giovedì 17 aprile 2008

The announcement by Bertie Ahern on April 2nd that he would resign as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland on May 6th brought to six the number of leaders who were somehow party to the Good Friday Agreement to leave the political stage. Already departed were: John Hume, the veteran leader of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP); David Trimble of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party (UUP); more recently Ian Paisley, legendary leader of the arch-unionist Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who declined to be part of the original agreement but more recently was the First Minister of the government of Northern Ireland; and also, of course, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Remarkably, of the key leaders of 1998, only the Sinn Fein partnership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness now remains intact.
And yet, the agreement itself continues to hold. Indeed, not only to hold but to become stronger, as evidenced by the recent willingness of Sinn Fein and the DUP to do business together, providing, respectively, the Deputy First Minister and First Minister of the province’s administration. This underlines the idea that, while political personalities may often be central to a political settlement, they are not the abiding dimension of détente, which has its roots in far deeper soil. Throughout the first part of April this year, the Irish, British and, to a lesser extent, the international media have been revisiting those fraught days of ten years ago, recalling the tortuous negotiations through the eyes of the main participants. Nearly all the leaders nowadays have nice things to say about all the others, except, incongruously, the leaders of the two unionist parties, which nowadays resent each other far more than either resents their mutual tribal enemies. David Trimble, the moderate unionist leader who worked so hard to bring his side to the table has now been consigned to the margins of history, while Paisley and his party, who resisted and rejected every step along the way, hold centre stage. Such history is difficult to analyse in rational terms.
The resignation of Bertie Ahern reveals a further irrationality in modern politics, only recently beginning to manifest itself: the split between actual political achievement and political standing in the eyes of the public. Besieged for months by a controversy concerning political donations, Ahern has resigned not because of proven wrongdoing but because his position had become untenable by virtue of the siege that had begin to immobilise him. A tribunal he himself established to investigate corruption of the planning process had started to investigate his own bank accounts and had uncovered a series of lodgements that he was unable to adequately explain. Nothing illegal has been established, but the persistent drip-drip of new revelation combined with an assiduous media campaign against him meant that Ahern could not, as he had wished, pick his own moment of departure later on in the current term of government. Thus, by virtue of the coincidence of his resignation with the tenth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the media coverage of the last weeks of his tenure has been evenly divided between condemnation and exaltation. He is roundly praised for his key role in the crucial negotiations of 1998, and yet politically condemned for things of apparently far less moment. It is agreed that history will remember him as one of the great Irish leaders, and yet he leaves office under a cloud. More and more, it appears, politics is a soap opera without a central moral narrative.

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