Former taoiseach Bertie Ahern was coy about his ambitions for a run in the presidential election later this year when he spoke at an event in his honour at Trinity College Dublin on Tuesday.
The former Fianna Fáil leader was hosted by the college’s Law Society and presented with its “Praeses Elit” award in recognition of his contribution to building peace in Ireland and other achievements.
Asked during a question-and-answer session about his intentions for the presidency – which comes vacant later this year at the conclusion of Michael D Higgins’s second term – Mr Ahern was non-committal.
“We’ll see,” he said. “Some of the names around, you wouldn’t know who they are ... But there’s some good people.”
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Mr Ahern said there were “three considerations” that he would have to take into account in making any decision to run.
“Would you get support? ... Would I get nomination of my party? ... Would it really suit me?”
“The answer to those three questions is still in the air,” he said.
He also noted that he would be 74 in the autumn.
Mr Ahern was warmly received by an audience of about 150 students at the event. Much of his address, and of the question and answer session, was devoted to his role in the peace process and the achievement of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, which Mr Ahern insisted was properly called the Good Friday Agreement.
The Belfast Agreement, he said, was a “misprint”.
He paid a generous tribute to former British prime minister Tony Blair, saying that “he never tried to pull a fast one on you”.
He also said the Irish government should have done more to help Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble, though he acknowledged that “Trimble was difficult to deal with – he’d come in the morning and eff and blind me. You just have to deal with it.”
On decommissioning, he added; “We didn’t do a good job – that was the one thing I’d do differently.”
Overall, he said, there had not been as much progress in Northern Ireland as he had hoped since the agreement was reached almost 27 years ago.
Mr Ahern said he believed he had been “unfairly treated” by the tribunals. In its final report, published in 2012, the Mahon tribunal found that Mr Ahern had given untrue evidence about the source of more than £215,000 lodged in bank accounts connected to him.
The three-time taoiseach acknowledged that his governments had made mistakes but defended their record on housing.
He said he had been “accused of building too many houses ... We were told it would take us 50 years to fill all the houses.”
“That was “bulls**t,” he added. “It took us three.”
He said “developers became the bogeymen of Irish society” after the economic crash and this was one of the reasons why there was a shortage of housing now.
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