Eventually those close to him were called to give evidence, including his staff, and when public sympathy mobilised around one of his personal assistants, Gráinne Carruth, Bertie’s days were numbered.
In my office in Leinster House a few days after Ms. Carruth’s appearance at the Tribunal, I watched with my staff, the live coverage of Ahern emerging onto the steps of his department, surrounded by ministers, and announcing his resignation. I thought of all his successes, all the elections he had won, his insatiable appetite for constituency work, his reputation as a mediator, and above all, his indispensable role in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland with Tony Blair. His popularity, too, was epitomised for me by a night in St Joseph’s Boys Football Club in Sallynoggin when he officially opened the new club-house. When the formalities were over, I made my way towards the stage to welcome him to my constituency, only to find myself being pushed aside by a group of female constituents eager to get up close and personal with him. ‘Get out of our way, Eamon,’ they said with a smile, ‘we want to give Bertie a kiss.’
And now, it was all coming to a sad end for him.
Leadership of Fianna Fáil and the office of An Taoiseach was handed over to the only candidate offering to succeed, Brian Cowen. It was a long transition, with Cowen taking time away from the capital to celebrate in his Offaly constituency. The Government had yet to wake up to the recession, it seemed.
Brian Cowen’s first test was the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty now only a few weeks away. Very quickly it became painfully clear that the Government had not prepared for this. The Irish EU Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, proudly proclaimed he had not even read it. In a radio interview, the new Tánaiste Mary Coughlan, seemed to have only the most rudimentary knowledge of it. It was a fiasco. Among citizens, there appeared to be resistance to this Treaty, even from among those who usually supported the EU. A new and credible opposition to Lisbon appeared in the form of Declan Ganley and his mysterious Libertas organisation.
My own first public meeting on the referendum was in Liberty Hall. To my surprise, the place was full when I got there, and when I started to speak, I sensed the mood was quite hostile. All of a sudden, I heard a voice asking gruffly from the audience: ‘What about the Passerelle?’ – a reference to an obscure detail in the Treaty. I knew I was in for a rough ride. When the meeting was over, one of my co-speakers, Proinsias de Rossa, who was an MEP at the time, was knocked to the ground and assaulted by a menacing group waving a video camera. What about the Passerelle, indeed.
Ruairí Quinn reported to the parliamentary party that on current trends the Treaty would be lost. It was decided that I should liaise with Brian Cowen and Enda Kenny, offer them our grim assessment and try to work out a joined-up campaign with them. This led to the plan that the Taoiseach and I would canvass together on a particular day in Dundrum Shopping Centre. When Tony Heffernan went out to reconnoitre the location for the photo shoot he discovered that the backdrop to the intended photo shoot was a Next shop front. I was repeatedly rejecting the notion of a Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition after the next election, and a picture of Cowen and me under a Next headline could not be allowed. But he couldn’t control everything: Cowen and I ended up –to the delight of the photographers and to the horror of my team – scoffing tea and scones together in a nearby café. We were joined on the canvass by local Fine Gael TD, Olivia Mitchell and by Seamus Brennan TD, then in the final stages of his illness. It was the last time I saw Seamus alive.
The Lisbon Treaty was defeated. In a poor TV interview afterwards, I came out with the words ‘Lisbon is Dead’. My intention was to say that the Treaty in its current form could not be put to the people again, but it was interpreted that I would oppose the holding of any second referendum. WikiLeaks later released a report by the American Ambassador of a conversation which he claimed that I had with him and which suggested that while I was publicly opposing a second referendum, I was privately indicating Labour support for one if held. I never met that particular US Ambassador at all!
We were halfway through 2008 and the Government had still not woken up to the fact that the country was in a critical condition, haemorrhaging businesses, jobs and reputation. It seemed that Fianna Fáil ministers who had become accustomed to government by auto-pilot could not mentally adjust to the new realities that economic circumstances had changed.
At first, nationalisation of the banks, as called for by Labour, was rejected by the Fianna Fáil-led Government. Eventually they were forced into it, first nationalising Anglo and later AIB. On the public finances, they were equally undecided. They began in July 2008 with a mini-budget which reduced expenditure by €1 billion. Reacting to the worsening circumstances, they brought forward the date of the 2009 Budget to October 2008. In a panicked attempt to compensate for some of their traditional overspending, they attempted to remove the automatic medical card to which citizens over 70 years old had been entitled. It brought thousands of angry pensioners onto the streets in an impressive show of strength.
The sudden economic implosion left people shocked at first, then frightened, and eventually angry. An entire generation of people with little or no experience of hard times were suddenly faced with the personal financial consequences of a recession. The past decade and a half had been one of optimism, growth, rising living standards, and unfortunately, massive borrowing. The payback would be different from anything Ireland had ever experienced. But it would not be the first time that some had lived through hard times, including myself.
I had grown up in rural Ireland in the 1960s when emigration was the norm, and I graduated from university in the mid-70s to see many of my contemporaries forced to leave the country to get work. I worked as a trade union official through the 1980s and recall the trauma of regular job losses. On many occasions I had to bring news of redundancy to meetings of union members, and I spent many hours in factory canteens talking through crises with men and women in their 40s and 50s who thought they would never work again.
I therefore had some understanding of the apprehension that now swept through homes across the country and I was determined that, in critiquing the Government’s performance, the Labour Party should always offer hope, clear solutions and a way out of the crisis. The situation and outlook were indescribably bad, but I felt things would get worse if the public mood turned to despair.
I travelled the country, addressing Party meetings, visiting workplaces, community centres, and accompanying candidates in walkabouts through towns and villages. We listened and gathered as much detail as possible on what people were going through, what they could be facing ahead and what solutions might help. These tours had an election focus; first, the local and European elections, in the first half of 2009; then the second Lisbon Referendum, in the autumn of 2009; and from then on, the general election.
Labour’s rise in the opinion polls came in phases. Through the summer of 2008, the Red C polls were showing Labour around its traditional 10 per cent. By the end of the year, it had nudged up to 13/14 per cent. The big breakthrough came in a series of polls in 2009.
I spent Thursday 12 February campaigning with Councillor Aodhán Ó Ríordáin in his new electoral area in Dublin North Central, visiting a school in Clontarf, meeting a community group campaigning for better bus services in Marino, a GAA club in Donnycarney, and eventually attending a meeting above a pub in Fairview to officially launch Aodhán’s campaign for re-election to the City Council. Broadcaster Eamon Dunphy had agreed to perform the launch, and as we gathered around before making our speeches, I was called out to a phone call from Tony Heffernan. He informed me that the IPSOS/MRBI poll in the next day’s Irish Times would show Labour on 22 per cent, only four points behind Fianna Fáil, who had fallen to 26 per cent. I knew it was just one poll, but couldn’t help feeling that the tectonic plates of Irish politics were beginning to shift. Fianna Fáil had never been this low, nor Labour so high.
Two weeks later the good news continued. A Red C poll in the Sunday Business Post showed Labour on 22 per cent and Fianna Fáil down to 23 per cent. We were now facing into the local and European elections with the wind behind us. The question was, could we convert favourable opinion polls into votes and seats in the elections on 5 June.
Our biggest challenge related to candidates and organisation. Outside the big urban centres, Labour was not organised at all or only minimally in many constituencies.