Revisiting Good Friday Agreement

On Sunday 11 October Andrew Marr interviewed Home Secretary Alan Johnson MP.

Please note 'The Andrew Marr Show' must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern recalls the conversations with his mother, Tony Blair and Ian Paisley during the Northern Ireland peace talks.

ANDREW MARR:

"The most skilful, the most devious, the most cunning of them all" was how the former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern was once described by another big figure in Irish politics, the late Charles Haughey. Irish politics being Irish politics, this was meant as a compliment to Mr Ahern's famous ability as a negotiator and fixer - skills he deployed to great effect in the talks leading up to the Good Friday Agreement. With Tony Blair, he was instrumental in bringing Unionists and Republicans together, and later persuading the DUP to share power with Sinn Fein. He also oversaw the transformation of the Irish economy. But Ireland's fortunes have changed a bit for the worse and the man once dubbed "the Teflon Taoiseach" resigned last year amid mounting pressure to explain his own somewhat unorthodox financial affairs. Well he's written about it all in his autobiography, just out, and he joins me now. Bertie Ahern, welcome.

BERTIE AHERN:

Thank you very much, Andrew.

ANDREW MARR:

We'll come onto all of that later on, but let's just start at the beginning. I hadn't realised quite what a strong IRA, old IRA family you came from. It was pretty hardline Republicans?

BERTIE AHERN:

Yes, it was. My father was in the old IRA. He was very active in the War of Independence and you know they remain a very Republican family. And when Fianna Fail started off in 1926, he went to de Valera.

ANDREW MARR:

Yes.

BERTIE AHERN:

But he was a hardliner, there's no doubt about that.

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah. And when your mother … Just before she passed away, you were about to conclude the Anglo Irish Agreement, British-Irish Agreement, and she said to you … She wasn't sure about it, was she?

BERTIE AHERN:

No, because we were removing Articles II and III, which was the constitutional claim …

ANDREW MARR:

(over) All Ireland, yes.

BERTIE AHERN:

… that we had on all Ireland. And you know this was a big thing to do and a big thing to trade off. And I think one of my last or second last conversations with her was … You know she was saying, "Are you sure about this?" and you know I never was able to conclude the discussion because she died in between. But it was a big step and for you know Republicans - people brought up in the 20s, the 30s and the 40s, this was something really … you know it was important to them.

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah. And you recount in the book going up to the North during the worst moments of the Troubles and seeing the burnt out houses and cars and the devastation and so on. Was there a moment when you yourself might have gone as it were that way towards the Provos or were you ever attempted?

BERTIE AHERN:

Well I think at that time, you know most young people I suppose as the Troubles were developing North and South - and particularly when you're 18, 19 and you believe there's easy solutions to every problem - but you know I suppose that crosses everybody's mind. But very quickly, I think when the violence turned into civilians, I mean I could never understand, as happens nowadays all over the world, civilians always seem to be the fodder in these conflicts and that was something I could never stomach. So I'm afraid whatever emotional thoughts I had just soon vanished.

ANDREW MARR:

And you went the political road and I suppose in many ways it culminates with those extraordinary meetings between McGuinness and Adams, on the one hand, and the DUP on the other - Ian Paisley above all. Did you find it, did you find it odd? Did you find it difficult to be dealing with people like that?

BERTIE AHERN:

Well you know at the very start, I never thought I could deal with these people at all because there had been that vacuum for years that there was no talking to Republicans, Irish governments didn't deal with them. There was very little relationship with the Ulster Unionist Party; none with the DUP. Ian Paisley had no time for any of us.

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah.

BERTIE AHERN:

And then you end up, as I did, for several years negotiating with them all; and, as you've correctly said, the culmination of it was you know Ian Paisley coming together.

ANDREW MARR:

Oh it's quite interesting. We've just seen a picture there of your handshake, that first handshake with Ian Paisley. I was slightly surprised because Cherie Blair said Ian Paisley wouldn't shake her hand because she was a Catholic.

BERTIE AHERN:

Yeah, well for years … I had met Ian Paisley for many, many years. I'd negotiated with him, I'd been through long talks with him. But that shot was the first time he ever shook hands with me, years after I'd met him.

ANDREW MARR:

Yes.

BERTIE AHERN:

And that's why it was the famous shot. He would not … He considered us all Papists and terrible people. But in the end, I'd have to say he took with the inclusive process and he moved and he made huge moves. And to his eternal credit, I think.

ANDREW MARR:

Yes. And of course the process never finishes and it's in trouble yet again with the devolution of policing and so on. Give us your take on what's happening there.

BERTIE AHERN:

Yeah, well I think that has to happen. It's like everything in Northern Ireland or maybe Irish politics. It's slow, it's cumbersome. And you know I think today, we have again Hillary Clinton you know coming to Belfast. She'll be meeting my colleagues today. She'll be meeting the parties in the North, trying to get the final piece. And all I'd say, Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness are good people, they've moved a long way. This is not maybe the last piece, but it is the last very important piece in the jigsaw, and I think it is important they make this decision before Christmas. Otherwise it'll just create a lot of bad taste and bad faith. And you know there are issues around that the Prime Minister I know has been working hard on this week, but I hope it is concluded successfully.

ANDREW MARR:

Tony Blair of course features a lot in your book and he's there always, as it were, with his smile and his affable nature and so on. How important do you think he was in the whole process because he would say, I guess, that this was one of his unqualified successes as Prime Minister?

BERTIE AHERN:

Well I know there's lots of arguments about other things about Tony Blair …

ANDREW MARR:

Yes indeed.

BERTIE AHERN:

… but from our perspective, Tony Blair was the real leader in all of this. If he did not stay engaged, as he did all the way from 97 - both of us were elected in the same month - and right till the end he stayed with it. He gave huge time to it, he engaged with all of the parties, he met them individually, they came to meet him in Chequers and No. 10. He came endless times to Dublin and to Belfast. So without Tony Blair, it is the united view in all of Ireland - North and South - that we would not have got …

ANDREW MARR:

(over) Not be in this place?

BERTIE AHERN:

He deserves all the credit he gets for that.

ANDREW MARR:

One of the things he gets quite a kicking for is not spotting what was going on in the long boom. And I suppose the same is said of you in Ireland because Ireland was even more property boom dependent, I suppose, and has had an even harder crash.

BERTIE AHERN:

Yeah, I mean from our point of view we had a great ten years, there's no doubt about that, but the property boom got too big and too many people were buying abroad. We were probably building you know too many houses at home. That was all based on our banks lending generously - as we've now found out irresponsibly - to people.

ANDREW MARR:

Yes.

BERTIE AHERN:

And the real problem if you put it in a few sentences, Andrew, was that the money was being borrowed on the wholesale market rate and the interbank rate. As soon as Lehman's went down, the investors called shot.

ANDREW MARR:

Yes.

BERTIE AHERN:

They said we want our money back. The banks' balance sheets were in tatters. And it's done us a lot of damage and you know we'll dig ourselves out, but it's created a lot of problems.

ANDREW MARR:

Now you had a lot of problems with the Mahon Inquiry into alleged kickbacks and so on. You've always vigorously denied it. You do again here.

BERTIE AHERN:

Yes.

ANDREW MARR:

But that really, that process of having to hand over all your financial affairs, all your letters, everything …

BERTIE AHERN:

Yes.

ANDREW MARR:

… seemed to have dragged you down as Taoiseach and made it almost impossible for you to carry on.

BERTIE AHERN:

It did because what happened in the last year or so, I was endlessly involved in this tribunal and the more it went on, the more it became more public, the more it became more difficult not just for me. I mean I suppose I'm in politics for thirty years, the cabinet table for twenty, you could almost take anything. But it started affecting the government, it started affecting my colleagues, and whatever we were being asked about, you know they were getting this in the neck. So you know I probably wouldn't have stayed that much longer anyway, so it …

ANDREW MARR:

But it was the final thing?

BERTIE AHERN:

It was.

ANDREW MARR:

And everyone gets tagged with one little thing. The thing that you know you're tagged with is that you didn't have a bank account for so many years when you were Finance Minister and so on. People find that quite hard to understand.

BERTIE AHERN:

Well what happened was I was going through a separation in the High Court, which as all these things do take a few years. My bank accounts were joint bank accounts between myself and my wife, but because I was going to the High Court, I wasn't using those bank accounts and of course that became a big issue.

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah. Now I must ask you about I mean your kids. You've got one bestselling novelist daughter. Your other daughter married a member of Westlife. I just wonder did you know this poor chap, Gately, who's died from Boyzone?

BERTIE AHERN:

I do, yeah. The Gateleys were in my own constituency.

ANDREW MARR:

Really?

BERTIE AHERN:

I know the family, I know Stephen. Ronan Keating's a very good friend of my daughter's, my family. He was with us the other night with his wife Yvonne. They came to my book launch. And it's just such a tragedy. You know Boyzone have been, and Stephen, they've all been part of you know Irish life and I suppose far wider than that in the last fifteen years and so successful. So it's a huge, huge tragedy …

ANDREW MARR:

Yeah.

BERTIE AHERN:

… and you know it's so sad. He was 33 years of age, fifteen years at the top. You know fine singer, fine musician, and this is just a huge tragedy to Irish entertainment, the Irish music industry, and I think further afield as well.

ANDREW MARR:

Bertie Ahern, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning.

BERTIE AHERN:

Thank you, Andrew.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

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