MR JOHN Bruton put in the best performance of his political life in the grand debate of would be Taoisigh on RTE television last night. He left Mr Bertie Ahern, the most popular leader in this election campaign, for dead.
The Taoiseach's opening statement was relaxed, personal, touching politics only in the broadest sense. The country had changed since he entered politics 28 years ago and he had changed, too. He invoked his wife, Finola's controversial theme that the status of women had altered how men think now. Would it be a country where the strong helped the weak or would status measure all at the turn of the century?
The Fianna Fail leader was much more political. He used the cupla focal required of an aspiring Taoiseach. He quickly got down to criticising his opponent for the stalled peace process, crime, and the lack of zero tolerance. "I have heard your hopes. Now I need your help" was his message to voters.
Going into the differences between the two alternative coalitions on offer tomorrow, John set out his stall about a cohesive government actually working as a team. Bertie said that the PDs and Fianna Fail "will have a cohesive formula". And, from there on, Bertie lost this section because he was constantly put on the defensive.
Then to public spending, the weakest performance point for the Rainbow Coalition. John, once again, used every opportunity to wind a kind of political philosophy around their target overruns. "I believe that if we have the money, we should spend it", he intoned, followed by challenges to Bertie on nurses' pay, Donogh O'Malley's free secondary education and third level fees. Bertie managed, on a few occasions, to put the right hard questions about the Rainbow's lack of spending targets. But John weaved away and the viewers wouldn't even notice that he hadn't answered them.
Bertie even sat idly by and allowed John Bruton to get away with claiming that both of them wouldn't be where they were today without free secondary education. How free was Clongowes Wood college for John Bruton?
The Taoiseach shouldn't have scored on the public spending section. He sailed through the single currency also. It wasn't until the end of the taxation section that Bertie used his Garret FitzGerald like litany of figures to score his first point. He displayed a far more intimate knowledge of the position of low earners, the man on £13,000. He equally made a better presentation on the state of life for the 30 per cent of people on the breadline. He was also very good on crime, an issue on which Fianna Fail has worked best in opposition.
Then the aspirant Taoiseach, whose predecessor and party brokered the peace process in 1994, came on to the issue he could not lose, Northern Ireland. While John Bruton ably defended his stewardship, he was not called upon to display his lapses of judgment. But Bertie Ahern stunned. He presented the North as a state of numbers: 50:40:10. That's 50 per cent unionists, 40 per cent nationalists and 10 per cent neither. As far as he was concerned, he said, the Irish Taoiseach had the responsibility to represent the nationalist community "strongly but not exclusively".
This opening gave John Bruton, who should have been on the defensive, the opportunity to argue that he saw the unionists as Irish people also. Bertie was left enunciating a Fianna Fail policy which would not have produced the historic Downing Street Declaration if his predecessor, Albert Reynolds, had pursued it.
The RTE match, in the end, was not a draw. John Bruton, the man favoured by the opinion polls not to be Taoiseach, was commanding.
