Ship of Fools (10 page)

‘Let me tell you about the very rich.
They are different from you and me.'

- Scott Fitzgerald

 

 

 

In his
Begrudger's Guide to Irish Politics
, Breandán Ó hEithir told the story of a priest talking to a small farmer in Cork in the late nineteenth century about the imminent blessings of Home Rule. We would, the priest assured the sceptical farmer, have our own parliament, our own police, our own church, our own flag and our own gentry. The farmer nodded respectfully and silently. As he moved away, he growled, in a mordant undertone, ‘We will in our arse have our own gentry.'

In the unbearably hot August of 2003, the feared French riot police, the CRS, moved in on the small town of Gallardon, south of Paris. The main street and several others were blocked off and the local shops had to close. The operation was a response, not to the presence of a terrorist cell or the discovery of chemical weapons, but to an Irish celebrity wedding. Two members of the Irish gentry, Georgina Ahern, daughter of Bertie, and Nicky Byrne, a member of the boyband Westlife, were uniting their dynasties in nuptial bliss. The twelfth-century Church of St Peter and St Paul had been chosen for its picturesque qualities, not least for the impression it would make on the readers of
Hello
magazine, which had paid €1 million for the rights to the event.

Even though the shopkeepers grumbled about the loss of
business, the citizens of Gallardon seemed happy enough to tolerate the general inconvenience. In their culturally impoverished condition, none of them had heard of Westlife, and many assumed that the famous Irish pop-star groom must be Bono. The evident opulence of the preparations fed rumours that David Beckham and Prince Charles were going to turn up. In compensation for the heavy security presence, they expected a more elaborate version of the town's usual Saturday ritual. As one resident explained to Lara Marlowe of the
Irish Times
, ‘There are weddings here every Saturday. It livens the place up. People come out to see the bride's dress, and they always applaud.'

When the citizenry went down to their church, however, they got a nasty surprise. Not only were the riot police keeping them from getting too close, but the entire entrance to the church was concealed by a large white tent, like a giant wedding veil hiding its demure face. Cars with curtains on their windows drove into the tent, so that bride, groom and guests could be spared the greedy gaze of the populace. Brawny security men in morning suits zipped and unzipped the entrance to the tent.

Watching this non-spectacle, the locals quickly realised that those who had taken over their town and disrupted their lives were not even going to give them a cheery wave in return. As one lady put it, the people had been treated ‘like imbeciles'. ‘We gave them our little village. We were happy to do it. And they didn't even have the decency to say hello.'

And something stirred, some memory perhaps that France had once had an aristocracy of its own and had replaced it with the idea of a republic. As Marlowe reported, ‘the onlookers' anger exploded. There were cries of “C'est dégueulasse” (It's disgusting) and rude comments about the
bride and groom. Each time the veiling operation occurred - on arrival and post-wedding departure for the silver van carrying the bridesmaids and the black Mercedes which brought the Taoiseach and his daughter - the catcalls grew louder.' The French, at least, remembered how to jeer the gentry.

There had been a kind of dress rehearsal for Georgina and Nicky's nuptials eighteen months previously, when both were guests at the wedding of another Westlife member, Bryan McFadden, to Kerry Katona, an event that was similarly purchased by
Hello
. This time, the wedding was in the village church of Rathfeigh in County Westmeath. Access to parts of the village and to the church were similarly blocked off, even after the end of the wedding, and
Hello
's investment was likewise protected by burly security guards and blacked-out cars. The Irish taxpayer paid for fifteen gardai to be on duty to keep citizens at a distance, and gratefully provided a pair of Garda motorcycle outriders to flank the bride's wedding car. As the newly-weds drove away from the ceremony in their blue Rolls-Royce, the gardai ran alongside the car to shield its occupants from prying eyes and preserve
Hello
's
droit de seigneur
. But whereas the French villagers had rebelled and jeered, the Irish crowds behaved with impeccable peasant propriety. ‘Loud cheers', reported the papers, ‘greeted the guests as they were ferried in a convoy of tinted-window minibuses and Mercedes saloons from Slane Castle.' Ireland had its own new gentry and no memory of the guillotine to cut through the celebrity culture with a sharp edge of republican self-respect.

In some respects, the most puzzling aspect of what happened in Ireland in the Celtic Tiger years is the tolerance of an increasingly confident and educated populace for the emergence of what was, in all but the external trappings of
title and accent, a new aristocracy. This was a much more substantial new elite than that generated by the outrageous fortunes of manufactured pop. But it tapped into a grander version of the same cult of celebrity. And it would prove to be, in its own way, almost as insecure as the instant fame of reality TV shows and assembly-line bands.

The concentration of the new wealth created by the boom could hardly have been more extreme. Excluding the considerable value of its residential property, the personal wealth of the top 1 per cent of the Irish population grew by €75 billion between 1995 and 2006. Bank of Ireland Private Banking estimated in 2007 that, including private residential property, the top 1 per cent of the population held 20 per cent, the top 2 per cent held 30 per cent and the top 5 per cent held 40 per cent of the wealth. Even this picture was somewhat distorted by the puffed-up book values of middle-class houses. If residential property was left out of the equation, the top 1 per cent held 34 per cent of the wealth.

Even at the apex of this pyramid, moreover, there was an extreme concentration of wealth. Of the 33,000 millionaires (again not counting house values), the vast bulk had less than €5 million. Three thousand had between €5 million and €30 million. Just 330 had more than €30 million. In the last three years of the boom (2004 to 2007) alone, the richest 450 people in Ireland added €41 billion to their combined personal wealth.

Yet, somehow, Irish people went on believing that they lived in a relatively classless society.

There were a number of reasons for this, chief among them the old Irish association of ‘upper class' with the Protestant Ascendancy, meaning that a Catholic aristocracy was a contradiction in terms. But another crucial factor was the way
the rise of the new elite in Ireland coincided with the global culture of celebrity.

 

Bertie Ahern himself was the key to all of this. His brilliance lay in his capacity to connect the old power structures of Fianna Fáil and the native business elite to the new global celebrity culture. He did this through the creation of ‘Bertie', a character who tapped into the tabloid celebrity world while keeping hold of a very old-fashioned Irish political machinery.

Celebrity culture thrives on two qualities. One is false intimacy - the belief that a famous person is known to us in the way our friends, family and neighbours might be. The other is blankness - the celebrity is a screen onto which we can project whatever feelings, thoughts or desires we choose at any given time. ‘Bertie' superbly encapsulated both of these qualities.

In politics, blankness might seem to be a weakness, but the Bertie persona turned it into a strength. Except under extreme pressure, Ahern could hide real feelings like anger, contempt or greed under a warm blanket of mundane amiability. He could be a friend to everyone, even his enemies - knowing, of course, that the politician who was attacking him today might want to do a deal tomorrow, or that the voter who was venting spleen on the doorstep might just change her mind in the polling booth. He could be a socialist with a trade union leader, a neo-liberal with a business leader. He could share with a property developer his contempt for tree-hugging environmentalists and with the Green Party a passion for sustainable development. This adaptability and opportunism, this talent for absorbing all sorts of forces within himself, may have had their source in a kind of emptiness, but they functioned splendidly in the shifting
landscape of boomtime Ireland. He had no hard core of moral passion to weigh him down as he modulated from friend of the rampant rich to every worker's pal. This allowed him to embody the evasiveness of a society that was in many minds about its own reality.

Even the impression of a certain kind of stupidity - his famous ability to mangle even the flattest of cliches (‘smoke and daggers', ‘upset the apple tart') often made George Bush sound like Abraham Lincoln - could enhance the power of blankness. Bertie underplayed his own keen intelligence, sometimes deliberately resorting to gibberish, not caring if it made him look obtuse and inarticulate. He downgraded the grandeur of his office by being infinitely available to ceremonially open pubs, hairdressers, supermarkets or packets of crisps. He deliberately gave the impression that he cared more about Manchester United or the Dublin Gaelic football team than about health policy or poverty. It allowed people to get used to the idea that he was not in fact willing to engage in any serious discussion about the direction of Irish society, and even to the notion that such matters were tediously irrelevant.

The blankness gave him more than the ability to remain, for all the apparent permanence of his power, a moving target. The famous Teflon surface that allowed him to deflect obvious questions about, for instance, his relationship with Charles Haughey, in which he was both the Boss's favourite protégé and entirely ignorant of his master's misdeeds, was also a screen onto which people could project an image they liked. It allowed for the other great celebrity quality - the false intimacy that turned Bertie into the embodiment of familiarity, the ordinary Joe with ordinary desires who just happened to be running the country.

Like all celebrities, he dished up selected slices of his real, private life. It ought to have been a problem in a country that still had a very high level of Catholic belief that, uniquely among international leaders, Bertie was a still-married man who not only lived with his girlfriend but made her the official first lady who accompanied him on state visits and hosted heads of state and government. There ought to have been some sympathy for the poor, conservative Archbishop of Dublin who not only had the Taoiseach's partner's beauty salon opposite the entrance to his palace, advertising Brazilian waxes, but who actually received an invitation to an official state reception in her name. But in fact the drama of Bertie's complex love life was perfectly consonant with the pop-culture worlds in which his broader family, with its best-selling popular novelist daughter Cecelia and his boyband hero son-in-law, was firmly embedded.

‘Bertie', in other words, was the image, not of a ruthless politician whose mentor was flagrantly corrupt, but of a character in a long-running soap opera. Such characters are meant to be people like us, except that an absurd number of dramatic things happen to them. Their marriages break down, they have complicated, drawn-out love affairs, their children marry pop stars and have twins, or become famous novelists overnight. Their careers follow strange paths, with unlikely and sometimes downright incredible twists. But they themselves remain solid, reliable, familiar. The things that happen to them are functions not of their character, but of the plot.

This is the way Bertie Ahern was seen, and it was the reason for his legendary invulnerability to scandal. When he signed blank cheques for Charlie Haughey, as he did for long periods in the 1980s when he was treasurer of Fianna Fáil, it
wasn't something he did but something that was done to him, as the innocent victim of an older man's wiles. When he brought Ray Burke back into cabinet in spite of specific allegations that he was on the take, it wasn't a conscious decision, just an accidental turn in a complicated story of which he knew nothing. When he got money from businessmen, it was something they did to him, an event beyond his control. He was as surprised as any of us would be if our friends suddenly gave us envelopes containing thousands of pounds while we were having a pint in the local. And when he had to explain that money as news of his ‘dig-outs' became public, he did so by shifting it back onto the soap opera territory of private life, in which he could no more help what happened than Ken Barlow in
Coronation Street
could help leaving Deirdre for Denise and then Denise for Deirdre.

The importance of Ahern's brilliant manipulation of celebrity and soap-opera norms was not confined to his own outstanding success in winning elections. It was not even limited to the way this greedy, money-grubbing man with wads of cash in his safe managed to make pretty much everyone believe that he was an ordinary fella, who was interested in money only to the extent that he needed a roof over his head, a few pints and a subscription to Sky Sports. It did more than any of that - it provided cover for the emergence under Ahern of a new aristocracy. It harnessed one kind of elitism (celebrity culture) to the interests of another - the operation of a governing class that (often quite literally) floated above the reality of Irish society. ‘Bertie' mediated perfectly between the existence of an aristocratic elite on the one hand and the public belief, on the other, that there were no class distinctions in Ireland.

To call the new super-rich elite an aristocracy is not as
whimsical as the absence of blue blood or old money may make it sound. Nor is it simply a reflection of its desire for country mansions and racehorses, or even of its preference for the helicopter view of Ireland. (The property developer Seán Mulryan and his wife, for example, flew in and out of their gloriously restored manor and stud at Ardenode in his-and-hers Sikorskys.) What made the elite an aristocracy was precisely its successful insistence on the privilege that defined the French aristocracy before the revolution: exemption from taxes.