Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Few people would call it suicide ...but dad made sure we knew
Ahern talks of grandfather’s death
It was a sad end he was a very hardworking man
BERTIE AHERN WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
BERTIE Ahern has spoken about his grandfather’s suicide for the first time revealing how deeply it affected the family.
Maurice Ahern died in 1933 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest after the former Taoiseach’s father Con rejected the family farm and moved to Dublin.
As he traces his roots in RTE’s Who Do You Think You Are? tonight viewers will see him visit the farm in East Cork and talk about the tragedy.
The former Fianna Fail leader sits at the kitchen table in the farmhouse once owned by his grandfather which remains in the family to this day. He reads from a newspaper report on the inquest detailing how on September 3, 1933, Maurice died of “shock and haemorrhage due to gunshot wounds to the chest”.
It said: “The unfortunate man was found lying dead on his bed in circumstances that suggested he shot himself.” Bertie reveals: “His wife died just six months before that and then my father had left against his wishes.
“As I understand it from the timing of the incident, that was the story.
“It was a sad end to him because he apparently was a very hard-working man.” The suicide was not a secret within the family and Bertie’s father Con made sure it was spoken about openly – but not in public.
He says: “At that time very few people would have ever said somebody committed suicide because it would have been covered up.
“But my father, I think for his own reason, made sure we all understood that.”
Controversy over his finances led to Mr Ahern’s resignation as Taoiseach in 2008 and some time later from Fianna Fail.
In the documentary the grandfather of five recalls how he got into hot water with political rivals because he used the word suicide which was taboo.
He said: “I remember getting into a bit of argument about using the word. Even though it is regularly done on sports programmes and others, I did it on a political programme.
“Some of the people who wouldn’t have been loving me said, ‘If you understood it in your family, you wouldn’t have said that’. Now, I didn’t bother saying that I understood it very well in my family because I had grown up listening to that.”
Bertie tells how his father never returned to the family farm which staunch republican Maurice bought from the British Government under the Land Act.
He said: “My father after that funeral went back [to Dublin], never to return for the rest of his life. He died in 1990 so it was 57 years.
“It must have been very hard on all the family, they stayed on the land, stayed in the farm and stayed in the house and we’re here today in the exactly the same house as it was at that time.”
Who Do You Think You Are is on RTE One tonight at 9.30pm.