Summer Holidays

Check this out also at The Irish Times site

It must be terribly hard for TDs and Senators. Being bundled like that out of the public eye for the whole summer. We all felt so sorry for them yesterday, to see them look so obviously glum and heavy-hearted as they nosed their BMWs out of the gates of Leinster House and headed off for ten weeks of idleness. They will be deprived of work and will have nothing to do to occupy thier time between now and September 24. It’s a hard station, we know. But (deep mournful intake of breath) it’s the life they have chosen.

My own first week working as a specialist political journalist was in August 2003. Arriving to work in Leinster House was like a GAA correspondent being assigned to Croke Park the Tuesday after an All Ireland football final. The political atmosphere was as spent as the PDs. We still had a paper to fill. It was thankless. Scrounging around for stories. Hoping that the odd TD playing golf at Playa de Nouveau Riche or at their Atlantic-hugging holiday home might have bothered to leave their mobiles on.

That autumn and the following spring a couple of the parties produced very impressive policy papers calling for Oireachtas reform. In the Senate, Mary O’Rourke was driving an all-party initiative to refrom that often entertaining, hugely interesting, but ultimately next-to-useless talking shop, the Seanad. It was great. And they kept on coming, the reform papers, throughout the period of the 29th Dáil. And how lovely they looked on the shelves. The same shelves already piled high with reform proposals for the 28th and the 27th and 26th Dáil…. ad infinitum.

Look at the Programme for Government. Look at the promises (included, the Greens say, at their insistence) to reform the Seanad and the Dáil. Note that a year has passed. Note that four years remain. Note that almost the exactly same promises will be contained in the next Programme for Government, for the 32st Dail whenever that might be.

This is not cynicism. It’s just stating a reality. A long time ago a Fine Gael TD Alice Glenn said that getting political parties to reduce the number of TDs and Senators would be like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. The first instinct of the political class is self-preservation. It is undeniable that the life is precarious. But the buffer zone they have created for itself is breath-takingly impressive. The Dáil sat for a total of 94 days in the 2007-2008 period. That total of sitting days has stayed unforgibably low (93 days in 2005; 96 in 2006 and 74 in the election year of 2007) despite promises each year to increase them. The House of Commons sits an average of 130 days each year. The US Congress is in session 160 days a year, almost twice as much as the Dáil. By the way, the Seanad sat on only 86 days in this political year.

The Oireachtas is also the legislature. A paltry total of 25 Bills have been passed since the Government returned a year ago. And some of these were standard bills that crop up every year like the Finance Bill, the Social Welfare Bill and the Motor Vehicle Duties Bill, all which give effect to budgetary changes. Some were necessary to give statutory effect in Ireland to European directives. Two of the bills corrected legal flaws in earlier bills. So we had the law-makers come up with a desolatory handfull of bills this year - the Immigration Bill, the Dublin Transportation Authority Bill, the Intoxicating Liquer Bill.

We don’t need to go into pay and expenses but the average basic salary for a TD is now well over €100,000. We have a total of 35 minister, 166 TDs and 60 Senators, pro rata way way more than any of our EU counterarts. And there are only two established Government backbenchers (Ned O’Keeffe and Jim McDaid) who don’t get some extra stipend for chairing or whipping committees.

Oh sorry, the committees sit during the summer, we are told. Erm, most of them will sit once, if that. That means that members (and they don’t all show up) have to come in one or two days during the summer just to show Joe Punter out there that it’s still ticking over, that the show is on the road.

Recession? What recession?

INSIDE POLITICS - LABOUR PARTY'S GILMORE

Eamon Gilmore's speech last night didn't depart from the recipe book of leaders' adresses. It was heavy on rhetoric and short on specifics. I think journalists last night struggled to find a news line (last time round, Pat Rabbitte included the bombshell that Labour would lower the standard rate of tax). Otherwise it had all the same ingredients and used more or the same method.

I'm not sure if I like the catchline around the word 'purpose' (too many echoes of a FF election slogan from 2002). If you were very cyncial about it you could distill it down to the following: Eamon Gilmore is a nice and worthy leader who wants to improve education, improve the health services, eliminate poverty and build a better Ireland - and do it all with purpose.

É sin ráite, he delivered it well, aside from opening nerves. He was helped, I'd say, by the fact that it wasn't televised live. And for me the most noteworthy thing was his promise of embarking on a mission around Ireland to meet and to learn. So early in the election cycle, that's the only thing to do.

Two other interesting aspects. Like Enda Kenny, Gilmore has excellent Irish and it was a pleasure to listen to a couple of complicated passages trí Ghaeilge rather than the token cúpla focal.

Secondly, there may not have been live TV but there was ustream.tv. And it was a super service. The viewership reached a peak of about 250 during the speech. That should very low. But in such a competitive word, that amount of people sitting at home on a Saturday night looking at a stream of a political speech on their computer screens tells you two things: not bad and Anoraks!

INSIDE POLITICS - LABOUR PAINS

JIMMY SANDS we will never forget you, went the joke about the status of the 1981 hunger strike in Irish history.


That joke was always a bit of a cheap shot and I suppose it is an even cheaper shot to start a peroration (oops Pat Rabbitte is no longer there), ahem, an argument on the future of the Labour Party.

As he prepares to give his first leader’s address to his party’s national conference (and his preparation was thrown off kilter by the death of his mother, Celia, this week) Eamon Gilmore has two major problems as leader of the Labour Party.




The first one is organisation. The second is even more challenging. To put it in highly technical political terms: Eamon who?

Gilmore faces the same mountainous journey that Enda Kenny faced in 2002 when he became leader of Fine Gael. Outside the Dáil, outside Ireland’s political beltway, Gilmore is unknown. Not quite like Kenny, who to borrow Rummy’s famous phrase was an “unknown unknown” (ie we didn’t know him and we didn’t know if he was any good). Those of us who watch him for a living know Gilmore’s ability. But the question is can he make it stick with all those who don’t watch him for a living and whose only real interaction with him is shoving a piece of paper into a box every five years.

Of course, this particular conference — time-wise — is a bit of a mistake. It was organised at a time when Labour believed it would be in government and that Pat Rabbitte would be Tánaiste. None of those eventualities came to pass. And a new leader, for whom it is too early to begin to build up profile, will tonight address a party for which it’s much too early to build up profile. It’s like a country man putting on his Sunday suit to go down and clean out the byre.

And that’s what Gilmore has been landed with this weekend.

The conference isn’t being fully televised (there’s a live stream available on the internet). There are no potential divisions (do we all take along long spoons just in case we have to sup with the de Valeras?). The meatiest motions are the usual existentialist ones — the political take on the plea from Captain McMorris in Shakespeare’s Henry V: “What ish my nation?”

And Labour will once again be embarking on an exercise asking itself what is its nation, what is its constituency, what is its identity in a fragmented society with none of the neat divisions of class that gave the party is support.

Nowadays, in south Dublin constituencies for example, the Labour Party’s base is predominantly middle class and liberal (the prawn sandwich brigade). In the north, west and south-west of the capital, its core is still blue collar workers. And down the country, there are places (Limerick, Cork, Westmeath, South Kildare, Waterford) where it still attracts a strong traditional rural and town vote, that would be more conservative in values. And then there are other places where the party has no presence at all.

And so to the heart of what this weekend is about. Sure, it was meant to be about taking stock of the new government and seeing the best way forward for Labour. The only slight glitch is that Labour isn’t a part of the Government.

And so two commissions, a Centenary Commission and a Commission for the 21st century will be formed to explore those things. I remember interviewing Pat Rabbitte about three years ago where he mulled over the direction that Tony Blair had taken the Labour Party in Britain.

Rabbitte never saw himself as a Blairite, pointing to Gordon Brown and the late John Smith (Blair’s predecessor) as personifying what he admired about Labour in Britain. Gilmore and those advising him will need to forge a strong identity and brand within the next 12 months. The test of its efficacy? When somebody asks what does Labour stand for, Gilmore and every representative of the party will be in a position to answer in one concise and simple sentence. It sounds fatuous, but it is important. People need to know what you stand for without having to listen to a thesis full of conditionalities.

And unfortunately for the opposition, Fianna Fáil has had a monopoly in that market for a decade. Who are you we ask. We are the party that governs and runs the economy, they reply.

And on that score, you begin to worry when the motion proposing one of the commissions runs to 720 words — I’m not codding you, 720 words — that’s almost as long as this column.

On an individual level, Gilmore could do worse than follow the strategy adopted by Enda Kenny. Spend the first year going around gee-ing up the party and rebuilding. Spend the second year building up your own profile. Throw everything at the local and European elections in 2009 (including all the dosh you have) to make some gains to allow you to claim electoral success. Then begin the big push for 2012.

This weekend’s conference will be the most hi-tech event hosted live by an Irish party. It’s going out live on the Labour Party site with clips being posted to YouTube. There are also blogs, online Q&A, photos on Flickr and mobile posts on Twitter. A lot has been organised by Shauneen Armstrong aka the blogger Red Mum (www.redmum.blogspot.com).

INSIDE POLITICS - LABOUR CONFERENCE

Eamon Gilmore's biggest problem is the one that Enda Kenny had when he became leader of Fine Gael.

Outside the beltway; outside his own constituency, outside Caltra and East Galway where he grew up (and is fiercely proud of - up Galway!) Gilmore is still an unknown quantity to the public out there.

His speech at the conference this weekend will be vitally important for him. He follows a very high-profile high-personality leader. He has been (unfairly) described as a clone or mini-me of Rabbitte. He has not yet established a national profile; or a 'brand' for himself - if I can use such a crude marketing expression.

And of course it has all been affected by the death of his mother this week, which has delayed his own arrival at the conference until Saturday.

Gilmore has done very well in parliament since becoming leader. He is non showy during the two key sessions of the week - Leaders Questions on Tuesday and Wednesday - and tends to ask Bertie Ahern pointed, sometimes blunt, questions, not giving the Taoiseach that much opportunity to pick the most convenient question to answer.

The main quote attributed to him on the Labour Party website sounds lovely when you say it out... but beyond its vague resonance of Martin Luther Kind does it really mean anything?

"Not only me, but others too; not only here, but elsewhere too; not only today, but tomorrow too."

Unfortunately for Labour, it's always been about tomorrow.

One thing to note about its conference (and I suspect the influence of super-blogger Shauneen Armstrong here) is that it has embraced technology like no other. Ustream, YouTube, flicker, twitter, online Q and A - you name it, it's there. It's going to be more exciting on the screen than it's going to be in real life down in White's Hotel! For more details of all the online stuff, see here.

And just to get in the spirit of things, my own blog will be chugging along on Saturday, and giving instantaneous (ie discount it immediately!) reaction to Gilmore's speech as it happens!

INSIDE POLITICS - THAT OPINION POLL

The latest opinion poll tells us that Fianna Fail is on the way out and if we are patient enough to wait out the other 1,500 days between now and the next General Election, we can collectively wave them goodbye.

In one sense, the findings of the TNS mrbi opionion poll are meaningless in the greater scheme of things. We're all still descending to base camp after the tough high altitude exertions of the elecyion – it will be next year before we will see the ambition expeditions towards the next electoral Everest begin.
But having said that, the result is very illustrative of the internal dynamics within Fianna Fail and the party's complacency and mediocrity since the Summer.

Since forging its very cute and very clever deal with the Greens, the PDs and the four independent TDs, Fianna Fail's leadership has spent the last couple of months doing what it's become good at (making sure that it feathers its own
nest) and doing what it's become bad at (looking after the rest of us).

It has to be said that the timing of this poll could not have been worse for Fianna Fail. The sampling was taken in the immediate wake of the cringe- inducing reverse over provisional driving licences and a couple of days after they accepted Biblical pay hikes for themselves and the top brass of the civil service, universities, local authorities, army, gardai and the judiciary.

It also came a week after another farce, the Department of Transport report about who knew what about Shannon losing its Heathrow slots and why Noel Dempsey was the last to find out. And On top of all that, Bertie Ahern's remarkable filmic tale at the Mahon Tribunal encompassing amnesia and his experience with international money markets was still fresh
enough in some people's minds to be reflected in this poll.

There's no doubt about it, it's a stinker of a poll for Fianna Fail and for Ahern himself.

When it comes to pinpoint accuracy, opinion polls have the same record as the Limerick hurling team in the All Ireland final. The three per cent margin of error, plus or minus, is too often ignored by the media. So a party showing 12 per cent could be on 9, and equally could be on 15. So
they're not good at picking up small shifts in support for smaller parties.

The corollary of this is that polls are good at reflecting large shifts of support (ie outside the margin of error) for the larger parties. And so we can take it that nobody in Fianna Fail can quibble with its monumental nine per cent drop in support.

Nor can Bertie Ahern. His stock has fallen dramatically. What is unclear is whether this is a one-off (an immediate reaction to a dismal week for FF) or whether the Teflon coating on his Anorak is finally beginning to wear thin. My own
inclination is that that massive pedestal on which we put this remarkable political animal is finally beginning to totter and topple.

A couple of people said to me: what difference does it make? Sure, won't he be hanging up the Anorak at the next election? It makes a big difference. Ahern wants to stay on until he decides to go. And he has given no indication so far it's going to be earlier than 2011, even though most others within FF are thinking of 2009 (and before the European and local
elections).

So, if the figures for FF continue to slump at its core support figure of the low thirties and if Ahern's own popularity fails to recover, you will begin to hear sounds from the FF committee rooms not heard for many a year – the nervous shuffling
of feet and the sharpening of long knives.

A lot of FFers believe that the Irish Times is out to get them. Their paranoia won't be alleviated by the inclusion of Tánaiste Brian Cowen among the leaders for the first time.
One of their backroom people told me Thursday night that he believed Cowen was included deliberately to make Ahern look bad. I think the reason for his inclusion was simpler – he is, after all, the anointed one.

But his popular showing of 49% compared to 43% for his leader will have a ripple effect within FF – and may see some of Cowen's supporters (who are more impatient for
the big prize than he is) begin to make subtle moves nudging him in that direction.

I'd love to think that the poll was a reaction to the disgraceful pay rises the top brass got last week. It wasn't solely that. People expect politicians to do that – that storm was only a one day blow. I really believe the pay rises to politicians, higher civil servants, and other high-ranking state employees was an affront to democracy. Ahern said there was no review in seven years. In fact the body awarded an interim increase of 7.5% two years ago. And Ministers and
TDs like Ahern, Cowen and company have benefited from every single national award and benchmarking award over the past seven years. And the body is independent but for most of its world-of- business membership, big six figure
salaries are par for the course.

Have politicians made one personal sacrifice over the past decade? No. The new class that has grown up to run our
State and its institutions has become self-perpetuating - looking after its own interests first and foremost.

INSIDE POLITICS - NO BRAINER OF THE WEEK

Some weeks you find yourself scratching around for fodder for the weekend column. Mostly it goes something like this: what the hell am I going to write about this week? Should I gratuitously attack The Anorak for no good reason again (that's a joke by the way)or do another organ-grind of my favourite gripe that there are too many of them; that they're all over-paid; and that as our State has evolved, their main function has increasingly become to look after their own interests. There's an actual committee (chairman gets paid an extra 20 grand) called 'Members' Interests'. That for me says it all!

But not this week, like manna from Heaven, like the fatted calf for the prodigal son, like the loaves and the fish, the Irish Times opinion poll landed on our laps this morning.

Sure, there are only 1,500 shopping days or so until the Next Election. But this was telling in its own way.

The figures have been parsed elsewhere this morning (see the Irish Times main article here) Polls are crude instruments of measure at the best of times. What they are very good at doing though is recording big falls and big rises of support for the main parties.
So the rises for Fine Gael (+4) and Labour (+5) are significant as is the whopping nine point drop for FF.

The reasons for this: the debacle over provisional driving licences; the cynical pay rises they all accepted last week; and a first public verdict on Bertie Ahern's extraordinary account of his dabblings in international monetary exchanges.

The most interesting thing is that Ahern's own stock has fallen sharply. And what complicates this is that the Times decided to include the anointed one, Brian Cowen, in among the leaders for the first time. I spoke to a FF insider for whom I have a lot of respect last night who said that he was suspicious of the Times's motives in including Cowen and that it was deliberately throwing a cat among the pigeons.

But that's not really fair. Cowen is widely accepted as the heir to the throne and it's always good to get the public verdict on his performance.

The Greens? Holding up. Gormley will will be happy with his rating. 5% is what they got in the election. Their support rose up to near 10% on a couple of occasions but ultimately that was meaningless.

INSIDE POLITICS - GREENS MEANS COMPROMISE

Well, as the saying goes, you say tomato, I say total and abject capitulation.

Us political hacks were roused out of mid-afternoon somnolence yesterday to be told that John Gormley and Brian Lenihan would be over to brief us on something significant.

And what was it? A new proposal to legislate for civil partnerships.

If you weren't as hard bitten and cynical as us, you would say: great. That's a fantastic breakthrough.

But there's a fly in the ointment!

And it's this:

Last February, the Labour Party tabled a Bill that would make civil unions between homosexual couples legal.

The Green Party enthusiastically endorsed it, with its justice spokesperson Ciaran Cuffe backing it to the hilt (listen to Cuffe's interview on Morning Ireland here)

In fairness to them the Greens also got a commitment into the Programme for Government. But the more hesitant FFers insisted that the phraseology be civil partnership rather than civil union.

The difference is important. A civil partnership can never be considered the equivalent of gay marriage - it will never be on a part with heterosexual marriage will will retain its preeminence in the Constitution.

Civil partnership is certainly a massive improvement on what we have at present. It will allow the legal rights of partners to be recognised by law (including succession rights and a possible share of assets). Forms of life partnerships other than homosexual ones will also be recognised.

But the manner in which it was all rushed through last night smacked of a little panic (though Green handlers were blue in the face last night saying that the party's programme manager Donal Geoghegan has been working on it since last September).

Tactically, it was a clever little move by the Labour Party. By retabling a motion that the Greens backed so solidly last February, they were calling the junior coalition party's bluff.

Would the Greens have to vote against a Bill they backed only last February and face more embarrassing taunts of sell-out and capitulation?

Did they have any choice but to pressure the senior partners to come up with something that would give them comfort?

The Government's own proposals (yep, they have been working on it since last September) were delivered orally by Brian Lenihan and John Gormley and were so vague that two words came to mind. One was 'back'. The other was 'envelope'. Heads of Bill by next March. Legislation by the end of this term. Proposals saying they would take account of the plethora of reports that have been produced in recent years.

All it was was a reiteration of the Programme for Government commitment with a couple of bells and whistles.

You need to be careful about the optics. This will be perceived as a reactive measure rather than something they came out with themselves. The Greens can't always be responding. They need to begin to assert their own agendas.

Otherwise it's going to pan out as a series of ass-saving exercises.

INSIDE POLITICS - DEMPSEY: THE KNOWN KNOWNS AND THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

WHEN an embarrassing story appears — like our one that showed early departmental knowledge of the axing of Shannon’s Heathrow slots — the conspiracy theories are never far behind.

For what they are worth, here’s a sample of them: Noel Dempsey knew all along — he must have! The Government planned all of this years ago and are now trying to cover their behinds! There was a second memo on the grassy knoll. And there’s a guy in the Department of Transport who I’d swear is Elvis.

Okay, we are being a teensy weensy bit facetious here. But it’s important to separate what conclusions can be drawn; and what conclusions can’t be from this very important exposure.

The first cardinal rule is that you have to go along with the available evidence.
And what does this show? It shows that far from the decision suddenly being made public by Aer Lingus after months of secret plotting, they had kept the Department of Transport (and others) in the loop about their thinking all along. It shows that the department was aware at the most
senior level on June 14 and was fully aware of the serious repercussions this would have for Shannon Airport.

But inexplicably and inexcusably, the new Minister Noel Dempsey was never informed.
The Freedom of Information records released to the Irish Examiner are a glaring example of communications failure at a senior level. Those who suspect that the Government didn’t realise how enormous an issue Shannon would be until it happened will find an armoury of ammunition here.

That hiatus of six weeks when nothing was done, or nobody reported to their political master, was simply not good enough. The effort to save Shannon’s slots might have failed ultimately, but they would have been in a far better position than the desperate rearguard action Mr Dempsey had to engage in after the decision was made in August.
And we come to the corollary of this, the equally important debate. What do the records not show?

Well, they show us absolutely nothing to suggest that MrNoel Dempsey was at fault, despite all the suppositions and conspiracy theories. In fairness, he can’t be blamed either for presiding over a department that made a dog’s dinner of an issue. The reason? He had just been appointed and was not even inon his first day in office when this mess happened.

So what was the state of his knowledge? Mr Dempsey told the Dáil on September 27 that the first inkling he got that Shannon was losing ALL its slots was on August 3.
In a conversation I had with him this week he said that from about mid-July (though he couldn’t pin down the exact time) he was aware that Aer Lingus was actively seeking out a new base.

He accepted that he would have had a general awareness that would have meant that a Heathrow slot or two would have been required. However,But what he was not aware of until that fateful meeting with Dermot Mannion and John Sharman on August 3 was that Shannon would lose ALL its slots.

Sure, opposition spokespeople and the media have unearthed half a dozen examples of leaks and heavy hints being dropped that Shannon-Heathrow was in danger of being axed.

And in a way, yes, it looks like the Government did not just have its eye on the ball. Mr Dempsey was like the guy in the Kit Kat ad who spends hours at the zoo — poised with his camera — waiting for the panda bears to appear. Just when he turns around to have his Kit Kat, the panda bears come out and skate around.

Be that as it may, the presumption must be that Mr Dempsey is telling the truth. This isn’t like the nursing homes controversy, where there was a conflict of evidence between Micheal Martin and the top civil servant in Health. The civil servant involved put his hands up immediately admitting his failure to forward the memo to the minister.

Until evidence emerges to the contrary, it is the height of silliness for Labour’s Tommy Broughan to call for Mr Dempsey’s resignation.

The opposition may not find it credible that the minister was left completely in the dark, but there is simply no evidence to back up their suspicions that he knew.

INSIDE POLITICS - OPPOSITION STRATEGY

At the end of every term, I do a simple exercise, totting up the topics that have been chosen by opposition leaders for the twice-weekly set piece Leaders' Questions.

Over the last couple of years, the predictable issues have dominated - health, crime, and the Government's secret weapon of dealing with Limerick's gang culture: unleashing Willie O'Dea in the city's drinking establishment on weekend nights.

The dynamic has changed this time. There are now only two leaders entitled to speak during Leaders Questions and one of them, Eamon Gilmore, is new. With the smaller parties and indepedendents having been hoovered up by Government or gobbled up by the electorate, there is no longer a technical group. There is no Joe Higgins. The Greens have forsaken tofu abstinence for meat indulgence. And Sinn Fein - this was meant to be another breakthrough election; it instead became a breakdown election. Down from five to four. No Mary Lou. Pearse Doherty in the Senate rather than in the Dáil.

So where once there were five, now there are two. It's very early days and I don't think that any of the opposition parties have got their heads around what strategies they will adopt to down the Government over the next five years.

With Labour's Gilmore, there has been a difference of style and nuance rather than substance so far - he is less confrontational; appealing more to reason and to common sense than Rabbitte was. For Enda Kenny and Fine Gael, it's been more of the same, leaving off where they left off before the election.

Fine Gael's big strategy last time was that the election would be won or lost on three big issues - health, crime and value for money. The party was wrong on all three issues. The election was won and lost on the economy.

So can we expect more PPARS, more attacks on health, more 'we are tougher than Terminator' on getting the criminal gang scum off the streets.

Well on the crime front, yes. Listening to Enda Kenny and Charlie Flanagan yesterday, it was deja vu all over again. Kenny repeated a phrase three times: "Who's in charge Taoiseach, the Government or the gangs?"

That had tabloid written all over it. But when Charlie Flanagan started talking about bringing the army onto the street as back-up, that really took the pip. Brian Lenihan should have dismissed it out of hand. Instead, foolishly, the Justice Minister actually said he would refer it to the Garda Commissioner. I mean, if you follow that line of argument, the next thing is that we will impose martial law on the street and people will begin to consider the sense of Eoghan Harris's baublings about armed gardai shooting it out with criminals and the return of capital punishment.

Nobody actually openly accused Bertie Ahern of lying yesterday. But if you were to look up a thesaurus, you’d find that just about every possible alternative word for ‘lie’ was used by Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore when describing the Taoiseach’s evidence to the Mahon Tribunal.

There is a basic rule in the Dáil. The ‘L’ word may never be uttered. In the past, we have seen some creative words and phrases being employed: dissembling; misleading the Dail; untruth; ‘being economical with the truth’.

But yesterday was of a different order. The L word was never uttered. But during the motion of confidence – and let’s make no mistake about – it was clearly meant. There was to be no softening of the blows. To all intents and purposes – but without every actually saying so – Kenny and Gilmore accused the Taoiseach of lying and lying and lying again.

During a heated, angry and self-evidently bitter debate on the motion of confidence in the Taoiseach – the first motion brought since one against Albert Reynolds in November 1994 – Ahern found himself being accused of giving incredible accounts, of fabricating, of not being credible, of creating smoke screens, of gelling bizarre and shifting tales. And all of this was said under oath, during his 18 hours of evidence to the Tribunal.

The charges that Kenny and Gilmore laid were far more serious, far graver than most of us had anticipated. Not alone did they accuse him of the L word. They claimed that most of the events that he has based his entire defence on never took place. They contended that events recalled by Ahern in interviews and under oath to the Tribunal – the famous Manchester dinner, the dig-out from friends, the Michael Wall payment, the purchase of £30,000 sterling – never took place.

This was the core of Kenny’s argument in one of the best speeches he has made since he becoming leder: “Most of the events we were discussing never happened. In my view, in my opinion, they’re fictitious. Complicated stories, part of a web of complicated stories designed to mask hard facts. Constructed stories to fit known facts.”
Phew! That was strong stuff and potentially as corrosive as sulphuric acid. And though he didn’t say it either, what Kenny also suggested that Ahern was on the take when he lodged amounts between 1993 and 1995 that equated to €300,000 in today’s terms.

“We have heard no credible explanation from the Taoiseach for these lodgements. In the absence of such an explanation the deep suspicion must remain that these lodgements were a result of personal contributions made to the Taoiseach.”
And in a speech designed to – and which probably did – get under Ahern’s craw, Kenny quoted lines from Des O’Malley (“I stand by the Republic”) and Jack Lynch (“we cannot stand idly by”) to make unfavourable comparisons to Ahern. He also quoted from Charlie Haughey to make even more unfavourable comparisons.

Gilmore, making his maiden speech as the new Labour leader, went over the same ground. He recalled the Taoiseach recalling next to nothing about the dinner in Manchester and then pointed out that Ahern claimed on the Late Late Show in 1998 that one of his best attributes was a good memory.”

His recurring theme – in a speech that was serious and under-stated - was that he did not believe Ahern, that the Taoiseach was making up cock and bull stories.

“I don’t believe him. Most of his own deputies don’t believe him and the public clearly doesn’t’ believe him either,” was a phrase that was uttered more than once.
And this is Taoiseach’s big quandary. There’s a serious credibility problem there that can’t be explained by unusual circumstances or his marriage break-down or by what he described as his ‘unorthodox affairs’ during his marital separation in the 1990s.

Yesterday he again urged people to read the 18 hours of transcript. But anyone who reads it will be no clearer about all those information and credibility gaps. If anything they will be bewildered and more confused.

He – and all his Ministers who spoke – also argued that there was not a scintilla of proof to back up the central allegation made by Tom Gilmartin that he took payments from Owen O’Callaghan.

Joe Higgins was spot-on last week when describing the use of this particular blatant diversionary tactic. Higgins gloriously employed a famous Bertie-ism to describe Bertie dragging Owen O'Callaghan and Tom Gilmartin in:

“It’s throwing red herrings at white elephants.”

But it’s not about Tom Gilmartin any more. It’s about all these odd transactions, all these unremembered and half-remembered sterling and Irish sums passing through accounts controlled by him. And why his explanation of them is of the ‘the dog has eaten my homework’ type.

He was effective in pointing out the belated courage of both Fine Gael and Labour in going for his political jugular. “One day they blow hot and the next day they blow cold. Last May to them due process was an excuse not to comment but today, political accountability is the pretext for their questioning.”

He repeated his defence against allegations made in the Tribunal, rebutting allegations that he had delayed or not cooperated or dissembled. But it’s all a bit conditional. He said he waived confidentiality on bank documents and consented to the Tribunal obtaining discovery against AIB. But he forgot to mention yesterday that he only did so when forced to by the opposition.

And as for changing his evidence he asserted: “The fundamental of my evidence have remained the same. I have added some detail and elaborated in some areas for reasons which I shall explain…. It is a matter of reality that one’s recollection can be helped as new information comes to light.”

And in a day where little love was lost, where both sides strongly signalled that the 30th Dail will be a tenser, colder House, he accused his political foes of “stretching the available evidence with malign invention.”

The thrust of the Government defence, put most passionately by Tánaiste Brian Cowen in the closing speech (and boy does he sound like leader-designate) the opposition were hypocrites in that they had only discovered high standards and morality after the election, where before polling day they back-pedalled from BertieGate more quickly than a professional cyclist on dope.

“I know right from wrong. And the Tribunal will be the arbitrer. If we are to avoid arbitrary justice let the Tribunal proceed with its deliberations.”
Ahern sat through it all, uncomfortably. It’s clear he finds it all, as he said in his speech, unseemly and intrusive. For him once no evidence is adduced of payments from Owen O’Callaghan, the rest is nobody’s business. The payments were, as he put it, being “assisted by friends”. In his moral compass, he did nothing wrong. He made a big deal of paying back €100,000 but he only did that when he had to (in 2006), when the outing of the payments last year forced him to do that.

And if he was uncomfortable, the Greens seemed to be squirming in their seats. Trevor Sargent, Eamon Ryan, Ciaran Cuffe and Mareey White didn’t clap at the end of Ahern’s speech as the loyal FFers did, but we were later told that nothing turned on that. The opposition reminded the party of how quickly it had rolled down from the high moral ground into the swamp. Trevor Sargents excoriations of FF in the run-up to the election campaign were recalled. And when John Gormley finally made an appearance in the chamber shortly after 8pm, he said little more than he would wait until the Tribunal reported. He then resorted to the magician’s trick of misdirection by reciting Green policy objectives in Government. There are times to talk about climate change but last nights was not one of them.

The L word was never used. They didn’t have to. This was the most serious attack Ahern faced in 30 years of politics. Strategically, the Government banked completely on the Tribunal report. When it does report (will it be next year or 2009?) if it criticises him to any serious extent, he will be a goner. One senior Green Party person thought privately that it might be as soon as the Christmas break.

We have all gone through the disconnect between the media and Joe Schmo out there. But no matter how you look at this one, Bertie Ahern has been damaged.

INSIDE POLITICS - RABBITTE RESIGNS

Yesterday morning Pat Rabbitte began ringing around his colleagues in the Labour Party. The news he conveyed shocked them to the core, even those who were closest to him. He was resigning with immediate effect, from that very afternoon.

None of the main players within the party had any inclination that Rabbitte was about to cut the rope and bring his five-year leadership of the party to an end.

“It came like a bolt out of the blue,” said Eamon Gilmore the Dun Laoghaire TD. “I am surprised and I am disappointed. I would have liked to see him continue on.”

It was the same for Brendan Howlin:

“It took me completely by surprise when he called me this morning. When I spoke to him earlier this summer when I was offered the position (of Leas Ceann Comhairle) he gave no indication.”

It was well known that Rabbitte was crestfallen after the election. Labour had gone in with 20 seats and returned with the same number. In the immediate aftermath, he described it euphemistically as a standstill election but yesterday’s development showed that – personally – it had gone far deeper than that.

As he himself said yesterday: “In the event, Labour won the same number of seats as in 2002 and failed to replace the existing government. As Leader I take responsibility for that outcome.”

But the other net outcome of the general election was that Rabbitte’s leadership was not in doubt. He had defeated Howlin, Gilmore and Roisín Shortall by a whomping majority in 2002. While a small minority of the party had quibbled with electoral strategy, there was no appetite in the party for another leadership contest, notwithstanding the electoral setback, and the question of his leadership was settled.

His colleagues knew that he was disappointed but underestimated its effects. “Sure, he took a hit but I thought that he’d get over it, lick his wounds and continue leading the party,” said a fellow TD yesterday.

While on his annual holiday in the Kerry Gaeltacht, Rabbitte thought long and hard about the election and his own future. His term of office wasn’t up for another year, until the autumn of next year. Yesterday he said it made no sense for him to stay on until then. That would have meant that a new leader had taken over just months before the local and European elections of 2008. He believed that the best time to go was right at the start of the term.

You couldn’t argue with any of that. Sure, if he was going, it was better to go now. But the bigger question was: why go?

Those close to him said that many underestimated the effect of failing to get into government had on him. Yes it was “unsuccessful only by a narrow margin” as he himself said yesterday but that was still failure.

“He gave the leadership every ounce of his being and energy over five years and he did a great job,” said Gilmore.

And having put that effort in, he decided in Kerry that he did not have the appetite to go once more into the breech. He is now 58 and given that Fianna Fail has covered all angles with its own little rainbow, it’s widely accepted that this Government will last its full term and that Brian Cowen will seamlessly succeed Ahern in 2008 (if the Tribunal goes badly for Ahern) or in 2009 or 2010 (at the latest).
And what the Labour Party needs, according to several of its strategists, is a person who has passion and energy, and has “fire in the belly”.

We will come back to that, but Rabbitte’s resignation brought to an end the career ambitions of one of the country’s most intelligent, able, and colourful politicians.
The native of Ballindine in Co Mayo first distinguished himself as a student leader in University College Galway in the early 70s before becoming the President of the Union of Students in Ireland. He later became a prominent official with the ITGWU union before entering politics full-time.

One major legacy problem that dogged him was his membership of Sinn Fein the Workers Party and its connections to the ‘Stickies’ of the Official IRA. But paradoxically Rabbitte joined the party after the split, having been previously a member of the Labour Party (he resigned because of his opposition to the 1973 coalition with Fine Gael).

And though the Workers’ Party (later Democratic Left) never really succeeded in becoming much more than a marginal presence, the party was notable for the quality of its parliamentarians – including Rabbitte, Gilmore, Proinsias de Rossa, and Liz McManus (who is now the acting Labour leader).

Indeed, when DL went into the Rainbow Coalition in late 1994, Rabbitte became a ‘super junior’ and one of the highest profile members of government, deservedly praised for his far-seeing drugs strategy.

An acerbic wit and brilliant parliamentarian, he became a darling of the media because of the ease and brilliance with which he rounded his thoughts and his hilarious put-downs. But there was an occasional arrogance and distance about him that some thought off-putting – and a sense that he could not translate his Dáil form to the streets, and could not relate to ordinary Joe Schmoes in the street in the way that Bertie Ahern did.

But Rabbitte’s performance on the hustings in the election campaign surprised everybody, showing far more appetite for the plod and flesh-pressing on the hustings. And despite going one witticism too far comparing Michael McDowell to a ‘menopausal Paris Hilton’ he was the hands-down winner of the TV debate.

But like all the smaller parties, it just didn’t happen for Labour. Some colleagues (particularly Howlin) put it down to the Mullingar Accord and the deal with Fine Gael. But Rabbitte believed it went deeper than electoral strategy.

“As regards (strategy), I remain absolutely convinced that it was correct to offer the people a choice of an alternative government,” he said yesterday. “It was not successful but unsuccessful only by a narrow margin… It would be a mistake to restrict the debate to electoral strategy.

“Whereas the core values of Labour are timeless and immutable, we must accept that Irish society has changed and we must change.”

Elsewhere he described it as the ‘brand’. Unions no longer wield the same emotional draw. People’s definition of working class, of blue collar, their expectations of politics, of how society should be ordered, has changed radically.

(For Rabbitte's own analysis of the election, follow this link. It is his delivery of the Jim Kemmy Lecture to the Tom Johnson Summer School in Galway)

It’s clear somebody else will have to be the architect of that change. The party can’t really skip a generation like it did in the early 1980s with Dick Spring. It’s too early in their careers for any of its three new TDs. The others, if not of Rabbitte’s generation, are very close to it.

Surprising though the announcement was, Pat Rabbitte was right. If the party wants to renew itself, the time to do is now.

INSIDE POLITICS - GREAT REFEREEING MOMENTS

AT THE last World Cup, Portugal and the Netherlands met at the knock-out stages of the competition.


I can’t remember which team advanced but one other detail of the game I can clearly recall. It was the most memorable refereeing performances of all time.

Valentin Ivanov was the unfortunate man who officiated at the game (and hasn’t taken charge at this level since). He made a decision that he wasn’t going to take any indiscipline from any side and that he was going to lay down the law from the start.




What transpired was a refereeing disaster of tsunami proportions. Ivanov administered a yellow card early on for a particularly bruising tackle. His mistake was this: the concept of discretion did not exist for the rest of the game. He applied the law rigidly, adhered to the standard that he had applied from the get-go. What we witnessed was an unravelling.

The game gradually descended into an unspeakable farce, a yellow and red card fest that just did not relent. By the time the game ended, 16 yellow cards and four reds had been shown. The four red cards were the most in a single World Cup game ever. In the last couple of minutes, players, pushed to beyond frustration by the referee, began making impetuous tackles and fouls.

And what was clear was this: the referee who had set out to show he was in control in such a strong fashion was clearly not in control. Any authority he had striven to assert had been shorn off him by the time the game began ticking into injury time.

I was reminded of all that watching John O’Donoghue endure his first day as Ceann Comhairle last Tuesday. One of the features of the last Dáil was the frequent clashes between his predecessor Rory O’Hanlon and Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, mostly over Rabbitte’s remote understanding of what constituted two minutes of speaking time. Very often Leader’s Questions would go 15 or 20 minutes over the time allotted to it. To be sure, one of the biggest miscreants when it came to time-keeping was the chief anorak himself on the Government benches but the Ceann Comhairle was never in the habit of telling the emperor about the state of his undress.

You could see where O’Donoghue was coming from. He wanted to impose himself like a strong referee from the get-go, hand out a yellow card for the first heavy tackle, and by imposing his authority early, the House would quickly come to heel.

His mistake was that he picked the wrong target. Enda Kenny was never the worst offender when it came to time-keeping — you could have counted on one hand the times that he and the chair had clashed over time-keeping.

And, despite the good-humoured and youthful smile that Kenny maintained throughout their exchanges, there is a bit of the old dog for the hard road about him (he is the father of the House after all — having been elected 32 years ago).

As O’Donoghue slapped him on the wrist for going over time, Kenny began gently goading him. You could almost see him light the match and quietly place it up to the very short fuse, put his fingers into his ear, and wait for the deafening explosion to go off.

He started off by telling O’Donoghue to be quiet. O’Donoghue was out of his chair quicker than dung off a shovel, and his complexion (always fleshy) began to deepen to scarlet with the heat being generated with his tongue.

The more he lambasted Kenny, the more Kenny and his troops began doing what the picadors in a bullfight too — sticking the spears into the flesh of the Bull O’Donoghue.

Before we get carried away with the ‘bull’ analogy, it’s time to return to football and to great refereeing moments of our time. Once he had brandished the first yellow card, there was no return. Within minutes, he was flashing them constantly and it was inevitable that the red card would have to be produced.

The problem was there was no saving face. If he backed down, he lost. If he persevered and ploughed on, he also lost. It was incredible. Arthur Morgan and Michael Ring joined the fray. The stuff with Ring was like a pantomime. You are leaving the chamber! Oh no, I’m not. Yes, you are leaving? No I am not.

Over the past four years since I first sat on the bird’s nest above the chamber, there have been some disruptive scenes. But it was the first time that the Ceann Comhairle provided the start, beginning and end of them.

To be sure, Fianna Fáil are going into government for a third time. But with the opposition benches packed to the rafters — and with a Ceann Comhairle as colourful as O’Donoghue — I think we will witness interesting times!

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner. (I am on leave for the next few weeks so blog entries will be sporadic!)

INSIDE POLITICS - NEGOTIATONS

Charlie McCreevy once said that he knew Bertie Ahern better than most and, at that, he knew him only 20%.

Fianna Fail took most people by surprise whey they held their first formal discussions with the Greens yesterday, moving much more quickly than was anticipated to expand their options on forming government.

But anyone who thinks the serious nature of the talks with the Greens – and the seriousness is particularly evident from the smaller party – signifies that this is now the option the FF is pursuing is mistaken.

At the same time, Fianna Fail is doing its business on all fronts. Dealings are continuing with the rump of the PDs and also with the independents – significantly Michael Lowry issued his first statement yesterday confirming that he too had been contacted by the Government.

He said: "I accepted an invitation from Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to negotiate on the terms of my involvement in a cross-party alliance to provide a stable government."

The latest overture by Fianna Fail to Lowry brings to twelve the number of TDs it might include in government.

Sources in Fianna Fail have spoken about forming its own kind of rainbow, with the PDs, the Greens and independents.

The downside of that arrangement is that Fianna Fail would have sacrifice more cabinet positions than what its own TDs consider necessary – at least two senior ministries (one each to the PDs and, at the very minimum, to the Greens) and at least two so-called ‘super junior’ ministries.

The other is that the Greens are to some FF rural TDs what reds were to McCarthyite Americans in the 1950s. They look at the Greens’ stances on corporate donations, on roads, on carbon taxes, on once-off housing and they see meddlers. However, of all the parties, FF backbenchers know their place and if a deal is struck with the deals, they will go along with it obediently while grumbling privately.

There’s a couple of problems for the Greens too, that are not all that easy to get over. For one, Trevor Sargent will have to step down as leader if they do a deal with Fianna Fail or else he will be accused of blatant inconsistency.

Secondly, the party is going to have a tough job convincing its members – and its potential supporters in future elections – that it is doing right by the country by going into government while at the same time ceding some of its core principles including a ban on corporate donations; carbon taxes, and transport policies.

The party really wants to go into government. But a sardonic political veteran observed yesterday. “If the Green Party is prepared to compromise on core principles so that it can wallow in high office, they will get hammered.”

From the moment that a third-term was confirmed, Mr Ahern has continued to speak about a Government of stability and longevity. In other words, what he wants is one that lasts for five years, come hell, high water, or further damaging Tribunal allegations.

Part of that equation is numbers. If he has four or five TDs above the magic 83 mark, it will allow the Government some breathing space, and make the government of the country over the next five years less of a hairy roller-coaster ride, where the government will always be vulnerable to a defection or an illness that gives the opposition a chance to defeat the government in the chamber.

However, the corporate memory within Fianna Fail still has bitter memories of the manner in which the most secure majority of all time – that with the Labour Party in 1992 – fell asunder amid mutual recrimination just two years later.

We tend to attribute a Machiavellian slant to everything Ahern says, and McCreevy's 20% assessment gives credence to this. But maybe he's been right all along and his preferred solution is the PDs and independents and he’s sounding out the Greens just to see if it’s a feasible option.

In another sense, he may be playing them all off one against the other to maximise FF’s negotiating position and minimise what the smaller parties might demand in relation to ministries and policy concessions.

And there are some who say that all of this talking is a prelude to FF approaching Labour with an unbeatable offer in the run-up to June 14th, knowing that it has at least one or two other deals in the bag.

The only thing that’s certain is that Fianna Fail has all the chips on its side of the table and is in a powerful position.

But trouble may be coming down the tracks in the shape of the Quarryvale module and the fresh questions facing Mr Ahern.

There’s an element of ‘don’t mention the war’ about this issue. It’s quite possible that a deal can be negotiated with ‘moral high ground’ parties. Of course, the $64,000 question is the $45,000 question, if you get the drift. Will that be conveniently long-fingered for future consideration.

Expect a long week of horse-trading ahead.

INSIDE POLITICS - ANTI FF BIAS?

I found myself at the wrong end of a Tom McGurk and John Waters onslaught this morning on radio - forced to act, by proxy, as a reluctant defender of the Greens (and I don't think I rounded my thoughts as convincingly as I might have).

But that's besides the point. John Waters has argued that there's an innate and inherent bias against FF in the media and by its commentariat. I'm not sure if that is true. Nor do I believe it's true, as he suggested last week, that very few called it right. There were many other voices in the media who suggested in the run-up to the election that FF would win - though none suggested they would win big.

Most journalists based their predictions (and their analysis) not on any fatuous wish-fulfillment for the soft left or prejudice against FF, but on the only evidence that was available to them - the opinion polls. The same polls waxed and waned during the 25 days of the campaign. And it meant that many journalists, who are creatures of the moment, swayed with whichever way the wind was blowing. In the main, the writing reflected this flux and the volatility (and I'm including my own in this). Sure there's a question about our almost craven reliance on opinion polls. And perhaps, in retrospect, journalists over-estimated the impact of the BertieGate allegations. But that's a reflection (sadly) of superficiality - not of any deep-seated ideological prejudice. And, what nobody predicted, even FFers themselves, was the sheer ease of the FF victory.

Sure, it's undoubtedly true that a number of journalists and commentators wanted FF out or wanted FG or Labour or the Greens in (and maybe that was reflected in their copy). But a majority? No way. To be sure, does the portrayal of the media as a homogeneous Dublin 4 smoked salmon set hold any water any more? Has the media really been stuck in some Palestinian scarf time warp while the real Ireland has moved on with real life? Hardly.

The under-reckoning (by everybody) of FF's stunning support level will need a fair deal of parsing. Sure, I agree totally with John Waters that there's a disconnect between what the media are clearly very interested in (Bertie's finances) and what the public are clearly not all interested in (Bertie's finances).

But, in all seriousness, could journalists have ignored or downplayed that story during the campaign, once the material got into the public domain? Sure, the timing was horrible for FF and for Ahern. Sure, he argued trenchantly that the circumstances surrounding his house rental and purchase were completely unconnected to the claim by Tom Gilmartin (one that's categorically disputed by Ahern) that Owen O'Callaghan had given Ahern £80,000. The timing and nature of the leaks was very unfair. It's also true to say that whoever was behind the leads was intent on damaging him politically.

But irrespective of source or motive, once the details about his house leaked out (especially the non-salary monies that were given to him, or passed through his hands) it would have been remiss of the media not to ask the kind of questions that journalists have asked since time immemorial, without fear or favour.

I don't think Waters was arguing against that, rather saying that the over-concentration on this (to the exclusion of everything else) placed a mote in the eye when it came to the mood, sentiments, and views of the electorate. And that, of course, is self-evidently true.

INSIDE POLITICS - THE SOUND OF SILENCE

The Dáil returns on June 14. We will have a Government then, one that you can confidently say will be Fianna Fail led, will also be Bertie Ahern led.

Right now, we are stuck in the political version of a holding pattern over Heathrow Airport. There is some movement but it is circular. The Labour Party parliamentary party is meeting today. The residue of a party once known as the PDs is meeting also.

Fine Gael have been busily selling the line that the FF win wasn't really that much of a FF win and that FG were the real winners, so much so that they might surprise us all and form the next government. To that end, Enda Kenny has met with just about ever entity that isn't FF or SF.

Even if he were to pull it off, and cobble together a government more complicated than the 1948 arrangement, it would be so precarious, so inherently unstable that it would hardly last a year. I think the current FG leadership is playing a longer game. On the one hand it's posturing a little, anticipating any leadership challenge, ensuring that Enda's leadership is a continuity one. The message: he's ready to step into the breech now and at any time as Taoiseach. Secondly, they are planting the notion in people's minds that if a FF-led coalition collapses, then it might not be necessary to go to the country.

Having said that, FF have the chips stacked on their side of the table. For once, I don't think we have to take a Machiavellian reading of Bertie Ahern's intentions. He wants the PDs and the independents first, and then the greens. The problem with the first constellation is question marks over Beverly Flynn €1.5 million debt to RTE. The majority will be wafer-thin - and it would be difficult for the government to last the course. I think the upper echelons of the FF leadership are not too gone on the Greens either - and it goes beyond its concerns about so-called flakey policies to the attacks that the Greens have made on FF's relationship with developers.

If there were an agreement with the Greens it might be more stable.

But looking at the numbers, you suspect that what FF might try for is a wider coalition involving FF, the two PDS, the six Greens, and one or two sympathetic independents.

FF and Labour? I just don't see it. Let's be real about this. Pat Rabbitte ruled it out. If there was wiggle room in what he has said in the past six months, its so infinitesimally small as to be negligent.

Fintan O'Toole's column in the Irish Times yesterday made a cogent argument for this set-up, saying it would guarantee both ten years of Government, could see the successors of Pearse and Connolly ruling the country at the time of the 100th anniversary of 1916. It makes sense for a Brian Cowen led FF. The problem with the thesis is that it's not a Brian Cowen led FF and won't be for at least another two and a half years.

And the Tribunals. It will cause Ahern trouble. Not now. None of his opponents have any appetite to take FF on for a third time over BertieGate. Ahern has already scored two emphatic victories over this. But the patterns in politics often mirror closely the patterns in sport - and yes, sport always provides a vivid dayglo metaphor for the human condition!. In championship fare, you often see teams demolish its opposition for three or four games in a row and then be set up as untouchable or as raging hot favourites. For all that, sometimes in the game that you least expect it, they put in an insipid performance and exit tamely. This might happen here. After the heroic seeing off of his detractors, the Taoiseach might be felled in the end by something small and seemingly insignificant - the piece of straw that will have broken the camel's back .

INSIDE POLTICS - ELECTION, THE OVERVIEW

By the times the polling stations closed at 10.20 last Thursday night, Bertie Ahern was exhausted. This had been his toughest campaign as Fianna Fail leader, physically and psychologically. The first one in 1997 had been hard but he was a younger man and also the challenger. The second in 2002 was hard too but his government was so strong, the opposition so divided that the outcome was predetermined weeks, maybe months beforehand.

This one was different. He always knew he would be going into this one as top weight, handicapped by two terms of office, economic uncertainty, and all the brouhaha surrounding his personal finances and his house.

Election campaigns are always intense but this one was bruising, nasty, divisive and personal – for the first two weeks, the questions surrounding his house were unrelenting and pitiless.

Ahern and those closest to him knew that they turned it, that the critical last ten days of the election campaign had belonged to them. But the effort to pull that off had taken his toll.

Sometime after the last vote was cast Ahern went to bed and fell into a deep sleep. He slept through the RTE exit poll at 7.00 the following morning. He slept through the tallies from the 43 constituencies. He slept through the first counts early in the afternoon, all of which told the same story.

And when he finally woke, sometime after 4pm on Friday afternoon, it was to a radically changed country. The first call he got was from his daughter, Cecilia, at around 5pm. She told him: it’s ok, everything is going well. For him, it must have been a transforming moment.

It’s a fair question to ask: what has radically changed or what has been usurped if everything remains the same, if the status quo is as it was.

But the drama of this election wasn’t that Fianna Fail held on, but the dramatic and emphatic nature of the party’s victory. They defied everything. The odds. The trust of the media punditry, which called it as going right to the wire. The expectations (over-cooked as it turned out) of all the other parties. This was a bigger victory than 1997. It was also a much bigger victory than 2002.

Sure, the numbers didn’t stack up as high this time. Fianna Fail came back with 78 seats rather than 80 but its percentage of support was actually higher. And now, not only was it facing a real alternative in the shape of the Fine Gael and Labour alliance, it also had to face down Sinn Fein – most of its gains in the marginal constituencies of Dublin and Donegal would be made at the expense of FF.

There was a mood out there all right, but it wasn’t – as the opposition parties believed – a mood for change. People were worried. About house prices. About health services. About transport. About public services. About quality of life. About the economic uncertainty that lies ahead. But the mood when it translated into votes plumped for trusting the incumbents more than the pretenders – or as Pat Rabbitte put it, a refusal to switch horse in mid-stream.

This was a fascinating election and one that will take many months to analyse. There were many factors that fed into the victory, some complementary, some harder to explain.

There has been a lot of talk this weekend about the air war and the ground war. The air war was the national campaign fought on the airwaves and in the media – the one in which Bertie Ahern took an awful lot of flak in the first fortnight; the one also that was turned around in the last ten days.

But Fianna Fail won the ground war, and won it hands-down. The party always seems to be ahead of the posse in terms of tactics and strategy. In the late 1990s it began maximising its chances of getting a seat bounce by ruthlessly minimising its number of candidates. This time round, it picked young, hard-working, presentable candidates, paying particular attention to the commuter-belt constituencies that satellite Dublin.

These were the constituencies where FF had taken massive hits in the local elections and in the Kildare North and Meath by-elections in 2005. The problems of these new suburban towns were manifold – marathon commuting times, no school facilities, no public transport, hassle getting childcare; class sizes, no real sense of community. The list went on. During the campaign, we heard of a family holding a birthday party for a child at 6.30am.

And how did these new communities vote? Overwhelmingly for Fianna Fail.
They picked up two in the three-seaters of Meath East (thwarting the high-profile Labour candidate Dominic Hannigan); Kildare South; Meath West; two in Kildare North, Longford Westmeath, and Wicklow; and three out of five in Carlow-Kilkenny.
And they held Dublin. Save for North Central (which was down a seat anyway) and North East.

But the ground war meant more than just candidate-selection. It was the incessant nature of the campaigning – two years of slog and constant canvassing. In the last couple of days of the campaign, Fianna Fail succeeded in dropping close to 1 million leaflets through letterboxes. That was awesome.

The air war had to be won too and it was in the last ten days of the campaign, FF managed to turn it around in its direction. Once Ahern issued his statement that Sunday, Fianna Fail finally managed to put BertieGate behind it. From there on in, it made sure it would not emerge again.

Brian Cowen (who was the real star of the show for FF) came out with an inveterate attack on Enda Kenny’s ‘contract’ the next day. Ahern was in Westminster the following day. By the time Ahern lined up against Kenny for the TV debate, the wind had changed. But as a senior FF strategist said yesterday, the debate became the ‘tipping point’, the moment in which it all swung back towards FF.

Kenny didn’t do badly in the debate and for many, the fact that he survived relatively unscathed was enough. But what Ahern succeeded in was raising real doubts about the alternative’s policies and figures. In a series of claims during the debate, he queried the costing of hospital beds, claimed the FG tax would favour the rich, said that a FG promise of 2,000 extra cops was only 1,000 extra cops. Kenny never departed from his script, was never prepared to go cross country to take Ahern on. And it cost him – because he left those allegations unanswered.

The FF big guns lined up on Friday and Saturday and pounded away with the same rhetorical artillery all weekend. This was an exercise in consolidating the advantage (privately, FF were furious that the media had not called Ahern a more clear-cut winner).

By the time FG (which has far fewer political heavyweights on its front benches than FF and Labour) got its act together – and it required considerable assistance from Pat Rabbitte – it was all over. FF had a lousy last Tuesday of the campaign – but by that stage it was too late.

Another feature that is staggering about this election is that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael do not seem to take each other on directly. Their seats are almost mutually exclusive. In 2002, when Fine Gael almost disappeared, they lost only five of their seats to FF. This time, they displaced Fianna Fail in Cork South Central and Cork South West, Dublin North East and in Roscommon/South Leitrim. The strange thing is FG gained more from Labour (and benefited hugely from its transfers) than FF. And it almost single-handedly wiped out PDs – taking all of its six losses.

Likewise, the real success of Fianna Fail this time round was in staving off the threat posed by Sinn Fein. If SF had succeeded in grabbing seats off FF in Donegal and in the three constituencies north of the Liffey, it might have been down to 74 or 75 seats and the whole dynamic of the election would be changed. And to be sure, while FG recorded a gain in Dublin South West, it was also a victory for FF which maintained its two by targeting the potential support of SF’s Sean Crowe (a strategy employed by Joan Burton with Joe Higgins in Dublin West).

For good measure, it also stole a couple of seats from independents, notably in Cavan-Monaghan, in Kildare North and in Tipperary South.

This became an election that was resolved by almost primal voter considerations. The environment didn’t really feature. Quality of life didn’t really feature. Nor did childcare. And was it a referendum on health? It became a contest of what Michael D Higgins describes as ‘managerialism’.

To me it seems people asked themselves the simple question about who should govern and gave surprisingly cautious, innately conservative answers to those questons. Better the divvil you know. Or the ‘cold feet syndrome’, to employ the words used by another potential David McWilliamesque corny phrase-maker.

Who should govern? When you are a smaller party you are not really in a position to provide an answer to that question.

A very senior FFer told me yesterday that this time round, voters voted for the politics of possibility rather than the politics of protest.

And distilled down, possibility could really express itself in only two configurations. Voters in 2007 asked the same essential question that voters have asked themselves since 1927 – Fianna Fail or Fine Gael?

And the answer to that question emerged in the hours of Bertie Ahern’s deep sleep. He woke to find a changed country, to find that he, the man in the anorak, would lead Fianna Fail into government for a third term.

He didn’t win an overall majority. But psychologically, it was a landslide.

A version of this appeared in this morning's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - SLEEP

It's strange the things you pick up on. But just about the most interesting thing about Bertie Ahern's interview with Gerald Barry on RTE's This Week (listen here )was his admission that he went to sleep after the polls closed on Thursday and didn't wake until 4.20pm the next day, missing exit polls, tallies, first counts, the whole nine yards. He woke up to be told by his daughter Cecilia that PS I won the election.

I wouldn't even compare our lot to that of politicians on the last furlong of a campaign (nothing is at stake after all except their jobs, their political parties and the whole future of the country). But even for us who follow and report, the last month in the run-up to the election was exhausting, and reminded me a lot of the intensity and pressure that surrounded the Leaving Cert.

On the day of the count I was up at 6am to do Newstalk and went to bed at 4.30 the following morning (after doing six hours of radio on RTE). I drove home, had a shower, changed clothes, snoozed on the couch for two hours,, and drove back into RTE again to meet the same people (Sean O'Rourke, Brian Dowling) who were there only three or four hours beforehand.

By tea-time Saturday, I was keeling over. I went to bed at 6.30pm and slept through until 8am Sunday morning.

This was my fourth general election campaign (and the first that I was working as part of a political team). It was easily the most exciting. There were so many moments; so many controversies; so much meat to put between the sandwich.

And unfortunately, because Michael McDowell can no longer be radical, he has no choice but to be redundant. He will be missed, as will Joe Higgins, another of the the Dail's great personalities and speakers. And so will Dan Boyle. I am very friendly with Dan and always had great time for his intelligence and strategic nous. The Green Party will sorely miss him too, especially if it is negotiating for government. I was sorry to see the great battler John Dennehy lose out as well. And Denis O'Donovan in Cork South West. Denis was a busy backbencher and took on a lot of extra work including the Constitutional Committee and the Judge Curtin Inquiry. That work may have cost him his seat.

Because of the geographical roots of my newspaper, I know the Cork and Kerry contingents well and and feel nothing but sympathy for those who have lost out. And Denis must felt hard done by losing out after only one term, having spent so long working to get in. It's a cruel cruel profession, where the atrition or churn rate eace five years is about a third of the 166.

Fianna Fail's victory will be parsed for months. It was more emphatic than 1997 and 2002 because of the very fact that the hurdles were much higher, all of Beecher's Brook difficulties. Here we had a government that was fighting for a third term, and being confronted with a regrouped opposition offering a credible alternative government. It also had to address full-on the serious controversy involving the Taoiseach's finances.

In addition there was threat from the flanks... the Greens and Sinn Fein were both capable of gouging seats from the margin. If the Greeens had won Wicklow, and if SF had taken seats in Dublin North and in Donegal North East, FF could have been left with 74 or 75 seats - and that would have changed the dynamic of the election entirely. In fact, FF took them on in Tallaght. They knew Hayes was coming back. They knew Rabbitte wasn't going to get ousted. So they targeted the one TD everybody thought was safe: Sean Crowe.

One of the things I'm writing about in today's Examiner is that FG and FF seats seem to be almost mutually exclusive. When FG lost heavily in 2002, FF took only five of their seats. Similarly this time around, the only gains FG made of FF were in Cork South West, Cork South Central, Roscommon-South Leitrim and Tipp North.

The other thing I can't understand is Enda Kenny's insistence that it's not all over. The final whistle has been blown. The other crowd have their fingers clasped on the cup. It's time to go home.

Oh yes. I had a corny joke about Fine Gael candidate and sandwich guru Brody Sweeney that I cracked at about 3am on radio but only Michael O'Regan picked up on it and chuckled. We were talking about the failure of the so-called 'celebrity candidates in the election. My comment:

"He mightn't have been much of a success in the polls but I can tell you one thing for sure, he was great on bread and butter issues."

INSIDE POLITICS - FIVE MORE YEARS

If RTE's exit poll this morning is accurate, then Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fail have pulled off a Houdini-esque act of political escapology. And our predictions will have been rendered null & void.

In the first week of the campaign, I was chatting to Brian Cowen and he reminded me of the comeback by Offaly hurlers in 1994, when they scored 2-4 on the last four minutes to shock Limerick.

If the figures are accurate (and they were within a point in 2002) it means FF will be in the driving seat. However, the party had a massive seat bounce in 2002 and picked up a lot of transfers - principally because of a divided and fragmented opposition. This time round FG and Labour will do better in enticing transfers.

A vote of 26% for FG will be good but Labour will be deeply deeply disappointed with figures that show it standing still, or even going backwards.

As in 2002, the opinion polls seem to have overstated GP and SF vote. Primary reason for this is that both parties attract a strong vote from younger people and - despite good intentions and campaigns like Rock the Vote - the percentage of this cohort that votes is low. Also SF attracts a stronger vote in blue-collar areas - again the percentage is lower than in middle class and rural areas.

Five More Years! Incredible.

For those who didn't hear RTE, here are the figures:

FF: 41.6% (-)
FG: 26.3% (+4)
Lab: 9.9% (-1)
SF 7.3% (+.8)
GP 4.8% (+1)
PD 2.6% (-1.4)

INSIDE POLITICS - MORATORIUM

Parties did little today. Only two official press briefings. All the politicians returned to their own constituencies.

Red C and the Sunday Business Post published an eve of election poll, which was sampled on Monday and Tuesday. It's up on the Red C website.

Shows that FF have risen since their poll on Sunday (but aren't as high here as they were in the TNS mrbi poll). Labour and Fine Gael - and the PDs - will all take some positives from it. It's where many commentators and observers sense the parties are at. On this basis, the outcome will go down to the wire...

There are two intriguing findings. One shows that people, when asked, now think the FF-PD combination is a marginally better one; reversing the situation on May 13.

More interesting is the finding that shows that the uppage in Fianna Fail's support coincided almost exactly with the fall in the number of undecideds. It seems that most of those who were undecided have decided in the past week (Westminster? The TV debate? Continuity? Doubt abut the wherewithal of the others?) to throw in their lot with the Bertie Bunch.

The Greens might also be worried by a little dip. Equally the PDs will take a crumb of comfort that they have crept up by a point.

John Gormley issued a statement last night saying that the last seat in Dublin South East was going to be a fight between him and Michael McDowell. Last minute shivers down the spine or is this constituency going to surprise us again.

I've got it in the neck all week for predicting that FF won't take a seat on The Week in Politics last Sunday. Maybe I concentrated too much on the failure of both the FF candidates to win council seats. I met Eoin Ryan in the Leinster House car park and he tackled me over it - saying that you can't argue against 1.2 quotes.

"There's always a FF seat in Dublin South East"

A mature recollection moment for me? Possibly. Sure, we are all fallible!

Here is the State of parties: (compared to last Sunday)

Fianna Fail 38 (+2)
Fine Gael 26 (-1_
Labour 11 (-)
Sinn Fein 9 (-1)
Greens 6 (-2)
PD 3 (+1)
Others 7 (+1)

INSIDE POLITICS - FF's JIM O'KEEFFE MOMENT

Well, Fianna Fail had their Jim O'Keeffe moment today.

The week before last O'Keeffe conceded at a Fine Gael conference that crime figures had not doubled between 1995, as claimed by his party, but had stayed the same. He then tried to distinguish between low-level headline crimes like bicycle theft and serious crimes like rape, murder and serious assualt, which he said had increased.

But the damage was done. And it was compounded when in the course of the TV debate Enda Kenny said O'Keeffe - his party's justice spokesman - had not been in possession of the correct statistics. It was a bad moment.

Since then, the FF big swatters have swung into action, especially Mr Brawny from Offaly. They've slid in hard on the 2,000 extra cops claim, the 2,300 beds and the allegation that FG and Labour's tax proposals would benefit the top 3% of earners.

No matter if the claims are true or not. The name of the game is to get them out there, to sow seeds of doubts about the ability and competence of Enda, his party and its partner. Did Enda ride all those tackles as well as he could? It seems the public didn't think so. And FG and Labour took too long to counter-attack and do it with the ferocity of the FF push against them since last Thursday.

It was only in the wake of yesterday's poll that they came out fighting. Rabbitte and Richard Bruton called the FF 3% tax claim a blatant lie. But was it all a little too late.

And then just as Fianna Fail was getting into a hubris frame of mind and patting itself in the back for punching holes in opposition policies, it went one step too far and punched a massive hole in one of its own policies.

The three Fianna Fail ministers at the top table today - Dermot Ahern, Mary Hanafin, and Seamus Brennan - opened their mouths just long enough to take one foot out and put the other foot in.

The context was this. Last night on Question and Answers Brian Cowen had finally come up with a figure, telling how much co-location would cost the taxpayer. €70 million per year over seven years was his response.

Then this morning, Brennan and Hanafin said it would cost €40 million between now and 2011. When asked to clarify this, total confusion reigned. Seamus started to talk about it being difficult to pin down the cost on tax breaks. When pressed further, a note was passed up from the sides.

And finally, Colin Hunt, the FF economic guru, had to step in from the wings to explain it all. Not everybody in the press corps were sure who he was. But he explained that the project would cost E47 million per year but the net cost would be E40 million. He also said that Cowen had referred last night to E40 million being the net cost.

There were a couple of snide remarks from journalists asking if Mr Cowen had had the right statistics to hand last night.

And predictably FG and Labour quickly went to town on it, with the usual barrage of verbal heavy artillery.

We're less than 48 hours away now. Tomorrow is a broadcast moratorium day. Embarrassing as it was for the Government, did it come a little bit too late.