"I certainly see where I got my republicanism and my love of our nearest neighbour." That was to be expected from this most guarded of politicians, who must have been happy to spend a television hour in which nobody was going to ask him about his personal finances or his party's role in the calamitous collapse of the Celtic Tiger.Īnd at the end, despite disclosures about family members taking opposing sides in the Civil War, he was able to feel vindicated in his lifelong beliefs.
Not all viewers, though, will have been happy with a film in which tired old tropes were trotted out about his father ("very much an active republican") and about his mother ("she hated the Brits" and was "an even stronger republican" than her husband), and in which nothing interesting was revealed about the man himself. As for what might be discovered, he chuckled in that mirthless Bertie manner with which we're all familiar: "As long as none of the relations are too close to the royal family, I'll be happy enough". This was after we saw him surrounded by his five young grandchildren, on whose behalf he was undertaking this research into family roots. "I passionately believe in a 32-county Ireland. "I am an Irish republican," he declared defiantly, as if someone was going to fight him about it.
Bertie Ahern needn't have bothered doing Who Do You Think You Are? (RTÉ1) because from the outset our former taoiseach knew exactly who he was.
0 kommentar(er)
