Here's How – Here’s How 152

Dafydd Iwan is the former president of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party.

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Bertie Ahern, we are told, had been readmitted, to Fianna Fáil. It might be better to use the term rehabilitated. Fianna Fáil activists gave him a standing ovation at an event recently, it was to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, obviously chosen to focus attention on the one positive part of his time as Taoiseach.

It’s worth remembering that he resigned from Fianna Fáil more than 10 years ago, ahead of a motion to expel him for lying to the Moriarty Tribunal.

It’s the little things that trip you up, as his predecessor said. He had already brazened out the ludicrous lie that when he was finance minister, he didn’t have a single bank account himself. The fact that he was going through a messy separation from his wife at the time, who would have been entitled to look at any accounts to determine appropriate support and child support payments, is not irrelevant. That’s also a good explanation as to why he owned his house under a false name.

When he was shown to have wads of cash in a safe that could not be explained by any other legitimate means, his only explanation for where the money came from was that he won it on the horses. Seriously, he said that with a straight face.

Nobody believed him, of course, it was all obvious lies, but when the Moriarty Report said unambiguously that he was a liar, it was impossible to even pretend to believe him, he was an embarrassment to the party who had to pretend to be horrified by all this, hence the move to expel him, and him jumping before he was pushed.

Anyone who has any doubts about why Ahern was pushed to the fore like this, rejoining Fianna Fáil, big events with party loyalists to celebrate him, even DCU giving him an honorary doctorate to the disgust of many of its students and graduates, of course without the slightest pressure from anyone, if you have any doubts about why this is happening then you haven’t been paying attention, and you should note that the Áras will become vacant in two years’ time, at most.

I don’t like Ahern trying to cheat his ex-wife, I don’t like his dodgy financial dealings, and I am at best amused that the dying embers of Fianna Fáil, which, let’s remember Ahern destroyed as an electoral force, I’m at best amused that the dying embers of Fianna Fáil are willing to dredge up memories of their previous incompetence and corruption to go along with their current incompetence and corruption. But don’t let me stop them from doing whatever self-harm they feel like.

I don’t like any of that, but that is not the best reason to think that Ahern should be grateful to spend his retirement in well-paid anonymity, and not bother us with this nonsense.

That type of corruption, the things that everyone mentioned are bad, don’t get me wrong, but they aren’t the real problem. Even at the top end, if Ahern stole ten or twenty million, like Haughey, there’s five million people in the country, that’s less than a fiver each at most. And he tried to cheat his ex-wife, that’s bad, that’s wrong, but again, there are five million of us. That was only cheating one person.

Not good. But not the worst of it, not by a mile. What was the worst? Let me tell you.

Remember the smoking ban? Remember how much we talked about the smoking ban. Saying that, it strikes me, quite a few of you listening might not actually remember the smoking ban. Smoking in workplaces – including bars, trucks, taxis, and building sites – was banned on 29 March 2004. Next year is the twentieth anniversary. If you don’t remember the time, let me tell you, almost nothing else was discussed for months before and after. People gave opinions that it would be impossible to enforce, it would never work. Some thought it was great, some people said that it was the end of democracy. They actually said that, that not being able to smoke in a pub meant the end of democracy. Others said it would be the end of the tourist trade, or said that it would be bad for people’s health, yes, really they did, but the main discussion was whether it would work, whether it would be possible to enforce it at all, with a large section of opinion saying that it would not.

I asked that question to someone who I knew, who was working on the project in the lead up to the ban. This person, I should say, smoked maybe 30 cigarettes a day. They made a prediction. They said that in two years’ time, we’d be so used to it that nobody would be able to believe that it was ever any other way. Basically, it turned out that they were right.

One pub-owner, the day after the ban came into force announced publicly that he had not enforced it in his pub, and would continue to defy it, and allow his customers do the same. The nay-sayers were convinced that this was the end of the experiment, the level of mass defiance would surely grow beyond what any authorities could tackle. What could they do? Impose a few grand of a fine, wait for Yerman not to pay it, by the time they could implosion him for like a week, the whole thing would have long since collapsed.

A well thought-out plan swung into action. The next morning, the Department of Health went into the High Court and said that this guy had broken the law the night before, and announced his intention to break it again that night, and they asked for an injunction to stop this. It was duly granted, that’s what happens when you announce your intention to break the law on national television.

So this clown was suddenly faced with the proposition that if he allowed smoking when his bar opened that evening, he would be in prison before closing time, and likely to stay there until he gave an undertaking to a judge not to break the law. He folded immediately, and no doubt anyone thinking of imitating him had swift second thoughts.

It was of course, the current Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin who was the health minister behind this, and he had a strong personal commitment to the policy. And it worked. Credit to him. But I mention this to illustrate that when that commitment exists, when the government decides that it wants to implement a policy, when they really want to make it work, they can.

With the right planning, the right design, and the right level of commitment from those in authority, the government can execute the policies that it wants to.

The corollary is also true.

When government fails at something, it’s rarely because they really tried to do it, but just couldn’t manage it. When they fail, it’s for one of two reasons. Either they didn’t care enough to really try, or they didn’t really want to succeed.

It’s true that some ex-ministers said that they really tried to do something and didn’t manage it, that can be true, but in truth that only happens when other ministers are either not cooperative, or downright hostile. If the government as a whole is behind a policy, unless it’s physically impossible, they can do it.

The Office of Corporate Enforcement, the ODCE, was set up in 2001, while Ahern was Taoiseach, in reaction to the corruption that was exposed by various tribunals. Or, I should say, in an effort to answer the criticism that flowed from that corruption. Supposedly, this would prevent corruption going forward. Fintan O’Toole has well documented the way that the ODCE was starved of power, starved of staff and starved of finances. Basically a brass plate, with nothing behind it.

Even now, the ODCE has only 30 staff. Compare that to the amount of law-enforcement resources spent tackling marijuana grow-houses. The ODCE has totally failed to deal with corruption, bad governance, and outright theft. It is an abysmal failure, if you consider that its job is to tackle corporate fraud. But if you consider that its job is to be a shiny button, that you can polish up a little every time another scandal breaks, without ever actually troubling the white-collar criminals too much, then it works quite well.

And the cost of that is not a fiver or a tenner each, or the odd person swindled. That has cost Ireland billions. Billions and billions, most of which we will never know the details of. There are plenty of other reasons, but that alone is a good enough reason why, if Ahern has his eyes on a large state-funded building on the northside in which to while away his declining years, I would suggest one about three kilometres east of the one he has his eye on.

Bertie Ahern does not belong in Áras an Uachtaráin, he belongs in Mountjoy Jail.