Bertie Ahern
Bertie Ahern was Taoiseach for eleven years, the longest since de Valera, negotiated the Good Friday Agreement in the week his mother was buried, presided over the Celtic Tiger and the borrowing that ended it, won three elections in a row, and resigned in 2008 over a tribunal's questions about cash lodgements in the 1990s that he answered by saying he had won it on horses. He was born in Dublin in 1951, the son of a Cork farm manager who had fought in the civil war, trained as an accountant, and was elected in Haughey's Dublin North-Central in 1977 as the constituency man who knew every doorstep in Drumcondra; Haughey called him the most skilful, the most devious and the most cunning of them all, and meant it as a testimonial. He was chief whip, minister for labour and, from 1991, minister for finance, and took the party's leadership in 1994 as the man least tainted by the Haughey years. Elected in June 1997 with the Progressive Democrats, he spent the first ten months on Northern Ireland, and on Good Friday 1998, having flown from his mother's funeral, sat through the last night with Blair and got the agreement that gave the North a power-sharing executive, the Republic's renunciation of its constitutional claim by referendum, and the release of the prisoners. The economy did the rest for a decade. There was growth of eight per cent a year, unemployment gone, a million immigrants, the national debt paid down and a property bubble the government fed with tax breaks and the banks with silence. He hosted the enlargement of the Union to twenty-five states at Dublin in May 2004 and was talked of for the European presidency. The Mahon tribunal on planning corruption, from 2007, asked about sums in sterling and dollars in his accounts while he was minister for finance with no bank account of his own, and the explanations changed. He resigned in May 2008, a week after addressing the joint houses of Congress, and the tribunal found in 2012 that it did not believe him. The banks failed four months after he left.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: taoiseach, politician
