The great and the good were gathered in the Everglades Hotel last Friday to pay homage to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern while the real movers and shakers were busily getting on in the real world.
The simple reality is that Bertie is a lame duck Taoiseach, burdened down with the accusations of tribunals. he can’t wait to be rid of his office and aspires to the much-coveted position of President of the EU. With a reputation as a fixer he may we
ll achieve his ambition and thus secure the financial independence that he has long craved.
As for the throngs in the Everglades Hotel, they were paying homage to yesterday’s man and the real question for Irish politics is - who will fill his shoes? Opinion polls are already showing that Bertie is regarded as history with a majority of those polled not believing his account of financial transactions a decade ago. All Bertie has to do is hang on to office and secure his accession to a plum job in Europe.
At this stage in the career of Bertie Ahern, a photo op with him is a waste of time but nobody in the SDLP seems to have been bothered to impart such political realism to Mark Durkan. The weekend press was full of a smiling SDLP leader, faithful and fawning at the feet of the all-conquering Taoiseach and seemingly begging Fianna Fail to take over the SDLP.
Some in the SDLP see Fianna Fail like the mitt of Padre Pio that they can use as a some kind of lifeline to protect them from the advances of Sinn Fein. Political reality is not that simple and in the last decade the SDLP has seen its vote plummet by 80,000. Durkan has not reversed this process and I greatly doubt whether Fianna Fail will see much merit in tying its future to seeming losers.
As I see it, politics is the preserve of ruthless operators, which is not a term one could apply to the SDLP in the last thirty years as it singularly failed to confront Sinn Fein on numerous occasions and even forfeited the opportunity to have republicans removed from the Executive for failure to honour the Mitchell Principles.
The Provisional movement, by contrast, was always the most ruthless of organisations and always knew the limits of the SDLP’s conscience and played upon the inability of the SDLP to be politically ruthless.
