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End of the Ahern Era

Irish leader Bertie Ahern - a key player in the Irish peace talks of the past decade - has announced he will resign in early May. I met him once in Budapest, he seemed affable. His resignation, somehow related to accusations made that he received dubious payments at some earlier stage of his political career, marks the end of a distinguished career - and also the end of an era in Ireland - what was called The Celtic Tiger, but may now be seen as The Ahern Era. It was a giddy time of champagne promises, to put the crass label on the crass bottle - when unexpectedly high rates of economic growth turned Ireland into the well man of Europe - turned Dublin into a quasi-Monaco of drug-fuelled high living. At times, it was surreal - house prices as high or higher in Dub 4 than in Chelsea or Ken.

All this had an impact on Irish poetry - after all, the cocktail of sudden wealth, perceived glamour, and political defrosting in the North was heady - and meant a new generation of poets emerged, who, for better, or worse, spoke for a new time, in new ways. These would include Kevin Higgins, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, Tom French, Patrick Chapman, Sinead Morrissey, and a few others, a generation younger (and sometimes bolder) - and somewhat freed from the Heaney/Muldoon influence. Not that any of these poets was ever a real estate or mobile phone tycoon - but something of that glister rubbed off on them. Ireland was big again - not just in America, or London, but at home. Now, there is a slump - the "super-boom" is over. House prices are falling to (real?) levels.

The gilding is coming off the age. Will another, newer generation of poets emerge, to diagnose the current? Or will the good under-45-year-old poets who came of age during Ahern's Era now fulfill their promise, simply in shabbier times?

Comments

puthwuth said…
Bertie Ahern was a jumped-up little slieveen of a cute hoor who should take a long walk off a short pier at the earliest opportunity. Brian Cowen now, there is a politician who can literally be described as 'jaw-dropping'.
Yeats notion of irish begrudgers being like a pack of dogs bringing down a stag, apllies here i think.

On his watch the war in the North stopped, due in large part to his efforts, and i saw the live resignation address, clearly full of emotion and you can see what happened, he thought, fuck it, i've had enough. And immediately all the gobs on sticks were totally out-foxed.

And what exactly has he done that is that wrong?

Even if he took a few quid, so what. This country is not even 90 years old, and the first leaders were all gunmen, three generations back and Ahern, unlike other leaders, has not sent anyone to their deaths in a dodgy war, and presided over an economic boom, and all the lawyers at the Mahon and other tribunals, are now multi-millionaires of the back of enquiring into supposed bungs of thousands.

Typical irish behaviour. Ten people in a room, and eight will find a reason to get rid of two and on it goes until there is just one person having a fight with themselves in an empty phonebox.

In the grand scheme of morality and politics, Ahern will be judged to have been one of, if not the, greatest irish leader of the modern era, and now the begrudgers no longer have a whipping boy, what then, said the Waghorns and Nolans, west brit tossers trying to inject a cod English outrage into cultural life.

They started selling the mail here two years back for 10 cents and now it's seventy, and the sanctimonious horrible gitz who gob off there are the most self righteuous bunch of tossers in print, who just want to bring down Ahern, for their own reputations, like a knobhead outside a chippy on a friday night hitting someone and dressing it up as saving humanity...Long live Berite, when he is jetting round the globe as an international statesman and some duffer here is running the show, then it will dawn on all the two bit politicians just what a giant he is, and the irish people aren't fooled by all this, and unlike the UK, the general populace have a far more nuanced grasp of reality, and all this binary dualistic rhetoric imported from the UK mindset, which the papers would have us believe is all jolly fair play.
Some Italian politician should learn from Bertie Ahern.
If accused in my country of bribing or being bribed a politician says he is persecuted by the judges for his political convinctions and so he will never resign, he will just keep shouting abuse.

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