Feckers (23 page)

Begrudgery, as explained by Professor Lee, is a defence mechanism born of the need to maintain a sense of status and dignity in a society with scarce resources, and may be the only known antidote to this condition. This is why it is a mistake to confuse begrudgery with simple envy or jealousy: a begrudger does not envy the target of his rancid passion; he tears him down, dismisses him and consigns him to oblivion. In the begrudger’s denunciation lurks also an annunciation of pride and self-satisfaction which nullifies any danger of succumbing to true envy.

Begrudgery is therefore a cultural form of what Oliver James called ‘discounting’, which is to say a device to minimize the demoralizing effects of the relative success or attractiveness of others. If upward social comparisons are not to result in a depressing sense of inadequacy, we need to remain mindful of ways in which the object of the negative comparison has been more privileged – or, alternatively, ways in which the envied individual may be disadvantaged – compared to ourselves. The art of the begrudger in remembering the celebrated and successful when they hadn’t a pot to piss in becomes, therefore, a device for the preservation of sound mental health and the avoidance of unnecessary feelings of inferiority.

Had the Begrudger been more vocal during the boom time, he may have provided the necessary reality check for those who had power and fortune, and for those among us who furiously, and ultimately unsuccessfully, sought to emulate such status.

41
Bertie Ahern

B
ertie may be the last of our leaders whom, instinctively and with ironic good humour, we refer to by his Christian name. Bertie. Albert. Charlie. Garret. All four names have a resonance in Irish politics, echoing backwards over three decades when first names carried significance beyond mere familiarity. This was a period of Irish life which may retrospectively be identified as falling between the reign of the austere father-figure (Dev/Lemass/ the Cosgraves) and the coming time of the mere administrator, a period when leaders were lifted up by the force of personal radiance as much as by aptitude or an appetite for power. The coherence of this theory is challenged by a single exception: John Bruton, always ‘Bruton’, a man who was only partly the victim of a ubiquitous Christian name. He was also a Taoiseach out of sync, never having achieved a popular mandate, and, moreover, seeming to point to that future time when an air of uncharismatic competence would be the defining quality of leadership. Bertie’s successor would never be ‘Brian’, but ‘Cowen’ or ‘Biffo’.

The Bertiness of Bertie, like the Charliness of Charlie, and the Garretness of Garret, is something we’re inclined to take for granted. These men did not rise to the top on the basis of ability alone, but more on their capacity to inspire liking, affection, even a kind of love, by insinuating a more intimate relationship with the voter by tapping into an instinctive connection with a deeper culture.

Most Irish people who were around during the recession of the 1980s regarded the Celtic Tiger as a fraud or an accident. It didn’t seem natural or real. Even those who came to embrace it could not quite shake off the suspicion that it had little to do with those guys grinning down from election posters. The thing about Bertie was that he didn’t seem to know what was happening either, but somehow came to personify our sense of growing optimism and glee. Although he made interventions from time to time implying that he knew what was going on, nobody ever took these too seriously.

Something changed, then, when we lost faith in Bertie, and it may take a while to perceive exactly what. The disappointment we felt at the end was not merely on account of his failures, which emerged, in retrospect, as legion. It went much deeper than that. Bertie had seemed to have it all sussed. He seemed to do things effortlessly, to possess a sure touch that not merely reassured us as to his competence but made us think that our big mistake all along had been that we were too inclined to see the glass as half empty.

Bertie, with his genius for malapropism, his talent for the unfinished sentence, his mastery of scrambled syntax, radiated something beyond competence, beyond even affability. He created a unique connection with the Irish people by seeming to be remarkably unremarkable in almost every way. He did not draw attention to himself, except by being there, somewhat bemused and diffident, the sheepish Taoiseach. The breadth of his gift for politics was equalled only by its invisibility. Sometimes it seemed that the artifice might be about to reveal itself, but such moments were always ambiguous and fleeting. Bertie was Bertie, and, even though this condition baffled every attempt at description, we fancied we had come to comprehend how it moved and what it meant.

Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, the two leaders on these neighbouring islands in the boom times coinciding with the advent of the third millennium, were stars in bright skies, both belonging more to show business than politics. The external conditions somehow conspired to ensure that both could shine, that nothing could break the illusion of the performance. Blair and Ahern made it look easy in a way that Brown and Cowen, even given similar conditions, would have been unable to match. Things might have gone just as swimmingly, but we would not have felt quite so self-satisfied about it.

Bertie and the way he might look at you. Bertie, who made it all seem so easy. Bertie, who might tell the odd porky, but wouldn’t do you a bad turn.

Stay cool, he seemed to say, in the very timbre of his voice. So, we stayed cool and started to believe in the miracle. What did Bertie stand for? Erm? What were his guiding ideas? Dunno. Bertie took the helm at a time when all the pieces were clicking together. He held the tiller steady enough to see out his own time before the whole thing went mushroom-shaped.

For just over a decade, Bertie Ahern grinned down at us as if to say: ‘Jaze, who’dave ever’ve taut it’d get so good?’ And then the bills came in.

There is a fantastic gothic novel by Patrick McGrath called
Dr Haggard’s Disease
, in which the eponymous protagonist, lovesick and isolated, goes slowly insane. Early in the story he seems perfectly stable, but by the end is clearly barking. And yet there is no clear tipping point, no definitive event, epitomizing or signalling a clear beginning to this process. By the time it begins to dawn on the reader that this character has actually been mad from the beginning, there is a sense not only of being taken in but of actually being conjoined in the doctor’s madness.

The Bertie Ahern saga is like that. At the outset of his joust with the Mahon Tribunal, when his explanations for his sudden windfalls of unaccounted and unbanked cash tended to hinge on the breakdown of his marriage, it was perhaps understandable that people would support him. Things began to get a little flaky after that, but still, in a certain light, his accounts of his bookkeeping and banking practices fell within the bounds of comprehensibility for those of us who can’t remember what we did with our wages last month, never mind a decade ago. Comprehensible, that is, provided you soft-focused the fact that, at all relevant times, Bertie was the Minister for Finance.

And if you took into account, as he never tired of hinting, that the tribunal process was driven by his political enemies, the idea of Bertie as persecuted innocent had a degree of plausibility. But inexorably the inconsistencies piled up and his multiple-choice explanations created a gridlock of scepticism that gradually vindicated those who had proposed a simple explanation from the beginning: Bertie was as dodgy as a nine-euro note.

Bertie’s mentor and notorious predecessor, Charles Haughey, was, in a certain sense, corrupt, but he was also unlucky. Bertie was lucky enough to lead in tumultuous times, which meant that he created a vast credit of indulgence for when the tribunal came knocking. Interestingly, the growing public incredulity concerning his evidence seemed to parallel pretty precisely the ominous rumblings of the coming recession.

While everything was going well, a little bit of how’s-your-father may have seemed like grease for the wheels of development and prosperity. But, with the boom over and a growing sense that we have little enough to show for it, there began to develop a palpable public feeling that, as the story of Bertie’s financial misadventures essayed a slow slide into farce, we were watching a dramatization of something much larger and much more ominous.

At each stage of the story, until the very end, it had been possible to leave open the merest chink of doubt. Taken in isolation, every one of his explanations had a certain ring of plausibility, though for those who zeroed in on the detail, the big picture became increasingly and embarrassingly irrefutable. Finally, as Bertie straightfacedly told the tribunal about his incredible run of betting coups and windfalls, the penny began to drop for even the most myopically loyal. The cats’ laughter from the gallery in Dublin Castle, as Bertie sought to weave yet another version of his financial good fortune, provided a most articulate summary of public attitudes. Before long, the implosion of the economy seemed to replicate the mess of Bertie’s personal finances, and we came to the ineluctable conclusions.

In the end we regarded him much as the wife and children of a polygamist might do on hearing that Daddy had four other families in various parts of the city. Our affection for Bertie had been total at times. And so the emergence of the truth about his miraculous powers meant, really, that we could never love again.

42
Declan Ganley

I
t was late 2007 when Libertas first began to be mentioned. It all seemed very odd. People had been used to all kinds of stray elements, usually from the far left or right, becoming involved in EU debates, but the idea of a wealthy businessman doing so was odd in the extreme. Why would someone like Declan Ganley want to pull down a European treaty? What sort of businessman could afford to take time off from his business to do for nothing the kind of stuff politicians were paid to do? There were all kinds of rumours about Ganley’s connections to all kinds of interests and operators, but nothing ever emerged to definitively answer the question.

Back in 1972, 211,891 Irish people (17 per cent of the population) had voted against joining the ‘Common Market’. Many of these people believed membership would lead to the destruction of the Irish farming and fishing industries, and make us the paupers of Europe. They insisted that the required trade-offs – especially the exchange of sovereignty and natural resources for infrastructure – would erode our long-term capacity for self-sufficiency. Over the years, these arguments continued to be canvassed, but were treated with increasing scepticism and impatience as Ireland began to experience the benefits of European partnership.

Whether we agreed with it or not, the decision to join the Common Market seemed to have set us on a path that could not be retraced. With ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, in 1992, we seemed to cross over into a new idea of Ireland, accepting a different relationship with the rest of Europe. With that treaty, the EU ceased to be merely a co-operative community, acquiring many of the characteristics of a single political entity. It might have been assumed that, in voting Yes to Maastricht, the Irish electorate was aware of the choice it was making. It seemed obvious that the argument for an independent Ireland had been lost. It also seemed obvious that our pursuit of a particular approach to economic development had left us no longer in a position to be choosers. Ireland had become so dependent on the relationship with the community that, henceforth, almost everything that concerned our future would have to be pursued from an acceptance of this dependence.

In 2008, when the Lisbon Treaty came up for ratification, the indigenous economy was largely secondary to a kind of cuckoo-in-the-nest multinational economy operating on the spoils of Ireland as a trade-off for employment. The national economic strategy, such as it was, depended mainly on outsiders coming in and creating activity from which we gained temporary benefits. The economic model we had chosen depended on our being part of the European Union. Nobody among our political class offered any vision by which we might proceed outside the EU or in a reduced role within it. We might smugly declare that we were ‘all Europeans now’, but we had no interest in anything but the dosh.

But an element of cussedness had crept into the electoral mindset during the Tiger years. Perhaps arising from cockiness or relative dissatisfaction with how the spoils of prosperity were dividing up, the sentiment of the average citizen appeared to lurch occasionally towards a kind of neurosis. This may have been one of the legacies of a decade of revelations about the financial improprieties of members of the political class. Suspicion and paranoia ruled, but there was also something even more fundamental, bordering on a visceral dislike of the political animal, and anyone who could stoke the fires of suspicion – as Declan Ganley and Libertas managed to do – had a good chance of giving the political establishment a run for its money.

This new sentiment was not confined to radicals or young people or any of the other standard disgruntled constituencies. It was to be found in all elements of Irish society – for example, in people who a generation before were part of what appeared to be an overwhelming moral majority in favour of Ireland’s participation in the European project. The 2008 referendum, for example, was dominated by the emergence of a band of media commentators opposed to Lisbon who, in every previous referendum, had been unquestioning cheerleaders for the political class.