Ahern Lauded for N.Ireland Peace Role

DUBLIN — Some have called it his toughest hour — and his finest. Bertie Ahern's mother had just died back home in Dublin, but Ireland's prime minister couldn't let go of the chance of clinching peace in Belfast.

So an exhausted Ahern flew by helicopter to his mother's funeral, then returned the same night to resume round-the-clock negotiations. In a few days, he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair shook hands and signed the landmark Good Friday peace deal. Ahern was still wearing the black of mourning.

His dedication amid personal grief impressed everyone that historic April in 1998 — particularly his erstwhile enemies on the British Protestant side of the fence.

In the years of peacemaking since, they have come to appreciate the Dubliner with an IRA-member father who helped turn history on its head, and they offered fulsome praise Wednesday upon hearing of his resignation plans.

"Without him, the deal on Good Friday would not have been done," said David Trimble, the former Ulster Unionist Party leader who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 because he kept Protestants at the table for 22 months, all the way to a deal.

Protestants — who long detested Irish efforts to involve themselves in Northern Ireland affairs — praised Ahern for treating their British identity seriously, dropping his country's decades-old territorial claim to the north, and insisting on a new relationship of partnership.

Trimble said some members of Ahern's negotiating team were "insistent on achieving a tribal victory" of Roman Catholic over Protestant. He said Ahern "brushed them aside."

"What we wanted and what we got from him was essentially a win-win," Trimble said.

Ian Paisley, the Protestant hard-liner who opposed the Good Friday deal but became a champion of power-sharing after his party crushed Trimble's in elections, offered a similarly warm assessment of Ahern's impact.

"In sharp contrast with other Irish prime ministers, I enjoyed a good working relationship with Mr. Ahern because he was willing to recognize the position of the (pro-British) unionist population that they had no interest in being part of a united Ireland," Paisley said. "He and I operated as equals, not as one trying to assimilate the other."

Ahern, 56, is quitting May 6 as prime minister after 11 years in power. Paisley, 81, who took the helm of Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant coalition administration last May, is expected to step down later next month as well.

Only a few years ago, the idea of Paisley praising an Irish leader would have seemed bizarre. One of Paisley's first political acts, in 1966, was to sling snowballs at the car of an Irish prime minister visiting Belfast. Throughout the first decade of the peace process he refused to hold political talks in Dublin and decried the Irish flag as "the butcher's apron."

Observers say Ahern's determination to build friendly relations with Paisley proved pivotal in achieving gains of recent years. He even offered Paisley and his wife, Eileen, a surprise wedding anniversary present during the most recent round-the-clock peace summitry in Scotland.

Paisley, who surprised many by praising the Anglo-Irish proposals from that October 2006 summit, admitted afterward that he hadn't expected such a gesture from Ahern — and its symbolism impressed him.

It was a bowl carved from a walnut tree at the River Boyne, the spot of a 1690 battle that Ulster Protestants celebrate each year as marking a historic triumph over Irish Catholics.

Ahern and a rapidly relaxing Paisley have broken a string of political taboos since the resurrection of power-sharing.

First, the two exchanged a happy public handshake in Dublin. They chummed up again at the Boyne battle site north of Dublin, when Paisley gave Ahern a present of a 1690s-era musket.

Two months ago — in the most surprising but least reported gesture — they visited the opening of a new luxury hotel in Paisley's Protestant heartland, their first joint appearance in Northern Ireland.

Analysts agree the foundation for Ahern's success was that he found a soul mate across the Irish Sea in Downing Street. Blair, who stepped down as British leader last year, rose to power within a few weeks of Ahern — and from the start they both wanted to push Northern Ireland peace as a team.

"History will be very kind indeed to Bertie Ahern," said Blair's former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, himself a key behind-the-scenes player in negotiations. "I think he had quite remarkable record, not just on Northern Ireland, but also on building a new relationship between the United Kingdom and Ireland."

Powell said Blair and Ahern "were two very, very different characters, but there was no edge between them. And neither of them carried the burden of history between Ireland and Britain on their shoulders."

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