All bets would be certainly off now if Bertie had stayed in office

THE tribunal was back as the most popular show in Dublin this week. But this time it was not as a drama but as pure farce.

It provided insight into why Bertie Ahern announced his decision in early April to step down as Taoiseach.

If he had not stepped down when he did, people would now be clamouring for him to go because the original tale Bertie told to RTÉ’S Brian Dobson in October 2006 is now in tatters.

In April this year, Bertie denounced the Mahon Tribunal’s cross-examination of his former secretary Gráinne Carruth as “lowlife stuff”. But that was a more apt description of his attacks on the tribunal.

Bertie and Ms Carruth had testified that what she had deposited in the Irish Permanent Building Society on his behalf was from his salary cheques and did not include any sterling. But then the tribunal discovered, for instance, that before she deposited IR£4,119.59 that £4,000 sterling had been exchanged for that exact amount. After a warning to reconsider her testimony, she acknowledged that there had probably been sterling deposits.

It was obviously a harrowing ordeal for her. “I think that was deeply unfair,” Bertie told the tribunal this week. “That was totally unnecessary.”

On March 5 this year, the tribunal learned of four such deposits. Ms Carruth could have been reminded before she testified that some sterling was involved and that the tribunal now had evidence of this.

“If they had bothered to ask, or had bothered to tell me the information, I would have done that,” the Taoiseach told Brian Dobson in Washington after his famous address to the United States Congress.

Anyone can make a mistake about the details of something that happened more than a decade earlier. But when Bertie blamed the tribunal for not informing him, he was lying. The tribunal had told him, on March 6, the day after it got the information. Bertie admitted that he had read the material on March 8, which was 11 days before Ms Carruth testified.

When counsel for the tribunal Des O’Neill asked Bertie this week why he did not inform Ms Carruth before she testified, Bertie said he had been too busy to tell her.

“Mr O’Neill, just to be very straight about it,” said Bertie, “reading something on the 8th and having to deal with cabinet meetings, deal with the Dáil —questions and answers in the Dáil, a full week in the Dáil, then deal with the European Council where you get monstrous briefs, and go to America, where I went to Stanford and made a major speech to 2,500 people, and then to do my usual… I just didn’t have time before I got back to you with your usual efficiency and with your large amount of staff and huge legal team had Gráinne Carruth in here trying to hang her. So that’s it, if you want the answer.”

At least this time the former Taoiseach did not raise the issue of the inflated fees that the tribunal members are receiving. He was the head of the government that agreed to pay them those fees. As Taoiseach for over 10 years, he could have done something about it but chose to ignore the problem.

In fairness, though, anyone would have difficulty in being precise about things that happened over a decade and a half ago. So Bertie’s confusion about the details of events back then is understandable. But blaming the tribunal for not telling him so he could remind Ms Carruth was a different matter He was busy in March and he could have forgotten to inform her, but that was not what he claimed. He told the tribunal he was too busy to inform her. Thus, he clearly lied to Brian Dobson when he blamed the tribunal for not informing him.

When Charlie Haughey got caught, at least he had the decency to be embarrassed, but Bertie persists in trying to blame those who have done their job in exposing him. He has been denouncing the tribunal for its treatment of Ms Carruth, but it was Bertie who hung her out to dry.

“Mr O’Neill, to be quite frank with you, because I feel sore about this,” he told the tribunal counsel, “I just want to make the point I think it was unreasonable. If you want to justify your existence and say that you were right, I will fight you tooth and nail, in here and outside, that you are wrong.”

Not so long ago, members of the cabinet were queuing up to defend Bertie, but those ministers were all particularly conspicuous by their absence this week.

For months, he has been trying to dump on the tribunal and elements of the media. The only empty seats at the tribunal this week were on the press benches. The tribunal has been accused of leaking to reporters, but the media seemed to have been as surprised as everyone else at some of the more recent disclosures.

No journalist seemed to have any advance hint of the loan that Bertie gave to Celia Larkin from Fianna Fáil funds to buy the house for her aunts. This week, we learned that Bertie went to Manchester about five times with IR£2,000 or IR£3,000 in his pocket for the late Tim Kilroe to exchange for sterling. He says this was so he could buy a house — another house, this time in Manchester. He was distinctly vague about exactly where he exchanged the money with Kilroe.

“It was not a big deal for him,” Bertie explained. “It was not a big deal for me, either. We did not have firm arrangements. We were not going to a strong room or anything. It could have been in a bar or his car.”

“You were not likely to be in a bar taking out the money?” Des O’Neill remarked rather incredulously.

Bertie replied with a flippant comment about the price of a pint. The audience laughed, possibly at the absurdity of his attempted joke. Judge Mahon certainly did not think it was a laughing matter.

MOREOVER, the news of Bertie betting on the horses came in like a real outsider. He said he scooped £8,000 from “one or two successful bets”. Who would have thought that Bertie, the most cautious of politicians, was a real gambler? The press benches would probably have been packed if the media had a tip on that one.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the allegation that Owen O’Callaghan gave a large payment to Bertie Ahern. So what? The great scandal of the 1950s involved Shanahan Stamps. When gardaí investigated a robbery at the company, they uncovered a massive fraud separate to the robbery. Should they have ignored the fraud because they were investigating something else? When the McCracken tribunal exposed Charles Haughey, Bertie rightly denounced his behaviour. “I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone,” he said.

Bertie Ahern accepted the dig-out from supposed friends, and he then appointed several of them to senior public positions. Now we know he did not need the dig-out because he had more than £80,000 in savings at the time. Poor Bertie.