Bertie and Celia, grubby questions and broken hearts — how my award-winning story about the nursing homes scandal left a bitter aftertaste

The tweet was a picture of the front page of the Sunday Independent from Christmas Eve 2000. The headline over the lead story read: “Revealed: how State swindled the elderly.”

My daughter saw the tweet and sent it to me by WhatsApp.

“Yeah, I won a Journalist of the Year award for that one,” I told her.

“How did you even find out about that?” she asked.

Somebody sent me the entire file, anonymously.

“That’s mad. Fair play to you,” she said, proud of her dear old dad.

Well, yes — and no, is the answer to that. Journalism can be a messy old business.

The newsroom was quiet the week before Christmas. When I arrived at my desk on the Tuesday, there was a large brown envelope, addressed to me. Inside was an unpublished draft copy of a report by the then ombudsman, Kevin Murphy, relating to the nursing homes story that has been the source of fresh controversy for the past week.

At the time, Fergal was writing health-related stories for the Sunday Independent, so I called him and asked his opinion. It was a complicated draft, so I asked if he would help, which he did. Indeed, the story might not have been published as quickly as it was, but for Fergal’s expert input.

My opening paragraph read: “A confidential report obtained by the Sunday Independent reveals in damning terms how the Department of Health and health boards knowingly exceeded their legal powers to take money from nursing-home patients.”

It detailed the ombudsman’s “inescapable conclusion” that the department had presided over a set of practices for a period of more than five years in the knowledge these practices were legally indefensible.

Inside, over pages six and seven, Fergal and I laid out the story in full, and Gene Kerrigan contributed his usual clear analysis under the headline: “When the public became the enemy.”

All told, the Sunday Independent did a good job parsing and analysing the “institutional resistance” the ombudsman’s office had encountered, and Fergal and I won an award for campaigning journalism the following year, which was nice.

Displaying early signs of the curmudgeonly character I have since come to embrace, I subsequently wrote that we did not really deserve such an award — a view not shared by Fergal.

My point was the draft report had been sent to the Department of Health for comments ahead of official publication the following month.

To this day, I do not know who sent the draft to me. This was before whistleblower protection, so whoever it was took a risk, for which I am grateful. That said, the report was due to be published within weeks anyway.

If an award was to be handed out, I felt the ombudsman should be first in line. His office had done the hard work, over five years.

The truth is, at the time, I was also somewhat uncomfortable with my role in the second week of coverage of the story — and this is where I come to Bertie Ahern and the messy business of journalism.

More to the point, this is where I come to Celia Larkin, the former taoiseach’s then partner.

At the time, the Bertie-Celia story was a regular feature in the gossip columns, particularly in the Sunday Independent. The great and the good were critical of this newspaper’s coverage of it, but the then separated taoiseach’s relationship was a legitimate story in the Ireland of 20 years ago.

For example, not long before we published the nursing homes story, questions were asked about Celia’s name being attached to official receptions in Ireland for UK prime minister Tony Blair and US president Bill Clinton.

At around this time, too, the then archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, let it be known he was unhappy to attend an official reception to mark his elevation to cardinal at the official invitation of Bertie and Celia.

Official Ireland was, in effect, publicly shaming Celia Larkin by asking if she was Ireland’s ‘first lady’ or merely the taoiseach’s lover.

In the second week of our coverage of the nursing homes story, I would come to participate in her humiliation in a way I have always regretted.

Here is what happened.

​Some months before, I attended a private dinner in Government Buildings with a few ministers and Bertie Ahern. 

The dinner was organised for some senior executives of what was then Independent News & Media, of which I was not one. However, I was learning to dance between the raindrops where big politics and business meet, for it is there the best stories are often found.

At the dinner it was agreed I would interview Bertie for the Sunday Independent that coming Christmas, his intention being to talk about how successful the country was set to become. This was at the start of the Celtic Tiger era, and eight years before the crash.

Bertie duly kept to his word, and the week after Christmas I made my way in the snow to Government Buildings for the interview, determined that it would not be all about the wonderful state of the country.

So, I questioned him about the nursing homes story, and the various shabby controversies around Celia Larkin.

Truth be told, I was more interested in the Celia story than nursing homes — it was more engaging for the wider public, I felt.

In the interview, Bertie went further than he intended. In retrospect, I had overstepped the mark in the kind of questions I asked, which I could see were making the Taoiseach extremely uncomfortable.

Did he intend to divorce his wife, Miriam? Did he intend to “regularise” his situation with Celia? No, he eventually said, in relation to the divorce question, and on Celia: “It is not a possibility... it stays as it is.”

When the interview was over, Bertie knew he had said too much and was most anxious that I did not report the complications of his private life.

As a quid pro quo, he offered more details on his government’s intentions around the ombudsman’s yet-to-be-officially published report — on-the-hoof details, so desperate was he that I not publish his comments on Celia.

A few hours later I received an unexpected telephone call from the then health minister, Micheál Martin, who offered further interesting comments: in effect, that the ombudsman’s report — our exclusive — raised fundamental questions about the entire public administration of the country.

That Sunday, we published two articles above the fold on the front page.

The smaller was headlined: “Civil service is out of control, minister warns.” It was a follow-up to the nursing homes report the week before, with both the Taoiseach and the health minister expressing “shock”.

I could tell myself that by taking the story into the heart of government, with quotes from the two most senior politicians concerned, I set in train the events that led to medical-card nursing home residents being reimbursed to the tune of €485m.

That’s what I would tell my daughter, anyway. Yeah, your auld fella’s fearless campaigning journalism secured half-a-billion for the wrongfully swindled elderly.

But the fact is, the story was going to come out anyway, and the refund was always likely to happen, particularly at a time of Celtic Tiger largesse.

And the other story — the splash on the front page that weekend? “Celia and I: ‘It will not happen’, says Ahern,” also detailed how Celia Larkin took the criticism of her public role “fairly hard”.

Not long afterwards, what was a true-love relationship between Bertie Ahern and Celia Larkin came to an end. And there he was the other day, ambling along a street in Fairview on his own.

So, what should I tell my daughter about her father, who was the campaigning journalist of the year?

That he may have helped secure half-a-billion of a refund for swindled nursing home pensioners, or that he asked grubby questions about a relationship that ended with a lovely woman’s heart being broken?

As I say, journalism is a messy old business.