Bertie Ahern – Former Prime Minister of Ireland Visited Parul University!

On 14 October 2026, Parul University students joined an online interaction with Bertie Ahern, former Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, of Ireland. He led the country from 1997 to 2008 and was one of the architects of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland. He spoke from Dublin, where he described a wet morning, to students watching from across India, in a session held in partnership with the youth organisation IIMUN.

He opened by congratulating the organisers on fifteen years of building a youth movement, thanked the students for their time, and wished them well in their studies and their lives. What followed was a conversation rather than a speech, moving through six questions. This feature follows them in order, because the through-line between a local park and an international peace agreement is the most useful thing in it for students.

Asked how he entered politics at the age of fourteen, younger than almost anyone in the room, Mr. Ahern gave a deliberately small answer. He had not been drawn to national politics as a boy. What caught his attention was what lay around him: the youth and sports facilities, the local library, and the parks in his own area. His entry into what he calls community politics came from those local issues.

He described a park near his home that was pleasant but had no playground, no swings and no slides, none of the things young people wanted, himself included. He wanted to see whether people could be encouraged to say openly that something was missing.

“To try and improve the infrastructure and improve the facilities in my local community.”

That, he said, is where it all started. For students who assume public life belongs only to people with a big platform, it was a quiet correction: he did not begin with a grand cause, but with a visible gap in his own neighbourhood that he judged worth fixing.

Asked how he would introduce Ireland to a young Indian audience, Mr. Ahern began with scale and honesty. India is almost a continent, he said, while the whole island of Ireland, north and south, holds only about seven million people. A severe famine in the 1840s set the country back by perhaps a century, and recovery was slow. The British once governed the whole island and remained involved in Northern Ireland, and the Republic won independence only in the 1920s. Its early leader, Eamon de Valera, had a real attachment to India through the following decades, so the two countries share old connections.

Ireland today, he said, is a modern and liberal country, a member of the European Union since 1973. On its people he was cheerful and direct: they work hard, value education, and enjoy music, song and life.

“We work hard but we like to have fun as well.”

He meets Indians working in Ireland every day, he added, especially in the technology sector. He did not inflate the country; the small population, the famine and the late independence were all stated plainly, and the modern nation described against that background.

The conversation then turned to 1998. After almost three decades of violence in Northern Ireland, Mr. Ahern had been at the centre of the negotiations that produced the Good Friday Agreement, working with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and with support from United States President Bill Clinton, and later George W. Bush. Asked what was hardest about keeping everyone at the table, he began with how the conflict started. It was, in his account, a civil rights issue that turned violent because violence was used against the people of Northern Ireland, and in his view it was avoidable: the authorities did not do the right thing at the right time, and thirty years of violence followed.

The cost was wide, he said. The whole island suffered, investment was badly hit, infrastructure was ruined and many young people left. It took years to build a process, and the agreement needed help from Europe and the close partnership he described with Tony Blair. His account was notably free of heroics: a conflict that could have been avoided, and a peace that took years of effort and outside help.

The good news, Mr. Ahern said, is that the agreement ended the violence. People have largely been able to live in peace, young people can build a future at home, employment has grown, and the universities of Northern Ireland have expanded, with Queen’s University and the University of Ulster among the strong ones. But he was candid that things are good, not perfect. Distrust remains, and trust is the hardest thing to rebuild.

“But trust is a very hard thing to build on.”

You can negotiate agreements and write anything into legislation, he said, but confidence, solidarity and trust still have to be built, and that remains the work of those in power now. Pressed on how a leader actually builds that trust across a divided community, his answer rejected force.

“I don’t think you can force people. If you try to force them, it doesn’t work.”

What a leader can do is persuade people into dialogue and peaceful means, and that takes time he considers well spent, because little matters more than letting people live away from violence. There is no stroke of a pen that makes people believe. It is, as he put it, working, working, working: explaining, holding dialogue, and making people feel genuinely part of the process.

“It is dialogue and trying to build understanding and confidence.”

With India among the world’s fastest-growing economies, Mr. Ahern was asked which decisions changed Ireland’s economic path. His answer was unambiguous: education. The most important thing Ireland did in his lifetime, he said, was to keep investing in it, because education broadens horizons and opens minds to what happens both at home and around the world.

He traced the policy to 1968, when free second-level education was introduced, taking young people up to about the age of nineteen, with third-level education later made almost free as well. The share of young people who stayed in education rose sharply, that generation came through in the 1970s and 1980s, and it took roughly twenty-four years before the country saw the full benefit. Only then did business expand and new companies arrive, as Ireland concentrated on information and communication technology, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and finance. Tax policy played a part, he said, but if asked for the single biggest factor:

“I think the biggest thing was the way we handled education back over the last 60 years.”

The timeline is the lesson. The decision came in 1968; the payoff took about twenty-four years. For a fast-growing economy, and for students in one, his point was about patience as much as investment.

The final question shifted the focus of trust to the individual, how do you establish trust amongst colleagues who have different opinions? His response was no different than all the other answers. If you instruct someone to do or change something, you need to give a reason. If a leader shows itself as a dictator, and announces a change which is imposed upon them overnight, resentment will grow and turn into ill feeling. Talk about why, though people might not agree, they have been dragged along. As the coach he was able to establish a connection with them based on the habit that he had established throughout the afternoon, which was to talk with people, give them reason, and take them along, be it at a park, a peace table, a school system, or an office.

For a university, a conversation with a figure like Mr. Ahern is not a photo opportunity but a form of education in itself. It gives students direct contact with how decisions are actually made at the highest level, in plain language and with the hindsight few leaders share openly. It is the kind of global exposure that widens a student’s sense of what is possible, and it carries lessons, start local, build trust patiently, invest in education for the long term, that apply as much to a career as to a country. If you wish to grow your career in Ireland, begin with Parul University’s pathway program and get to work for your dream company!