The day ahern's mask slipped

What will you think of when you look back on 2004? The Olympics, the war, the cabinet reshuffle, the local elections? For Bertie Ahern the year was a mixed bag. The high point was the agreement on the European Constitution, and the low point was undoubtedly his appearance at the Mahon Tribunal.

By the time he was called to give evidence on 7 April, his appearance was the most anticipated of anyone to appear in the planning Tribunal's seven year existence.

Tom Gilmartin had given evidence about meeting Ahern in the Dáil and said that an unknown person had asked him for a huge bribe immediately after the meeting. Mary O'Rourke had appeared two days before the Taoiseach and said that, unlike others, she had a clear memory of the meeting the two men were at.

On the day of Ahern's appearance huge crowds turned up at Dublin Castle. I met people there who had come from all over the country, pensioners using their free travel passes to see the democracy they had invested in for their whole lives in action. Some were disappointed. For the first time ever people were turned away from a Tribunal because there was no room. The hundreds of seats in the public gallery were filled early on and even some regulars were disappointed.

When the Taoiseach finally got going he appeared to be cruising for much of the time. If there was a meeting it was just a chit-chat sort of a meeting, totally informal, he had dozens of meetings like that every day, so how was he supposed to remember meeting one developer. It happened every day at a time when the government was trying to kick-start the economy.

It was an hour after the Tribunal's normal sitting time when the war broke out.

Things took a dramatic turn when council for Tom Gilmartin stood up to question him. Still bristling from remarks by the Taoiseach's own lawyers when cross examining Gilmartin that he was "shifty", Hugh O'Neill immediately went on the attack.

The resulting confrontation between the lawyer and the prime minister was the sort of thing you never expect to see now that leading politicians have managed to insulate themselves from robust questioning.

O'Neill started softly, asking the Taoiseach if he could see Mr Gilmartin in the room. Of course I can see him, I recognise him from the papers, the Taoiseach said. O'Neill then turned on the heat. He asked Mr Ahern if Gilmartin seemed shifty, in reference to the trawl done on Gilmartin's past by the Taoiseach's team. The search turned up a long-forgotten court appearance by the developer in which he was said to have shifted his evidence in a property dispute and it was used in an attempt to discredit him. The shift in tactics by the Gilmartin team startled the Taoiseach, especially when the barrister kept asking him the same question over and over.

It was a treatment he is not used to and he clearly didn't like it. As Taoiseach, he can more or less dictate the question he is going to answer, and decide not to answer at all if he doesn't want to. But here someone else was dictating what was being asked, in a forum where he was obliged to answer. For someone so used to being in government, it was probably the first time in his career he was forced to answer questions he didn't like and in a position where his usual evasiveness on awkward questions didn't work.

He ended up practically snarling and shouting his answers. He never accused Gilmartin of being shifty, didn't carry out the trawl into his past.

In the end the mask slipped entirely. Gone was the consensus seeker liked by all, and here instead was a party leader you could imagine completely at home in the cut-throat world of political back rooms. There were more difficult questions about subsequent telephone calls from Gilmartin, and it must have been a very grateful Ahern indeed who left Dublin Castle that evening.

The thing about it is that it made very little difference to him at all in the end. The disaster of the local and European elections were just around the corner, but in truth they owed little or nothing to his appearance at Mahon. The Government's fate on those had been sealed some time previously, in the immediate aftermath of the last general election.

Even so, I often imaging that Mr Ahern must look back on that day and feel a little trickle of cold sweat run down his spine.

Fergal Keane is a reporter for RTÉ Radio 1's Five Seven Live