Bertie Ahern has opened up about a tragic family death on RTE’s Who Do You Think You Are.
The former Taoiseach, who delved into his family history for the episode, revealed that he lost his grandfather to suicide just six months after the death of his grandmother.
The 67-year-old read a newspaper excerpt detailing the death of his paternal grandfather – “September 3, 1933, Maurice died of “shock and haemorrhage due to gunshot wounds to the chest”.
Bertie continued on to open up about how the tragic event affected his family.
“His wife died just six months before that and then my father had left against his wishes,” he revealed.
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
Did you tune in to the episode?