No beer, no cheer: Bertie in November

IT’S November, the month every year that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern gives up Bass for 30 days.

But going on the tack also often means going on the attack. In the Dáil yesterday, the Taoiseach was in a mean mood, barely disguising his annoyance at the opposition who were clearly getting under his skin.

There was no shouting or roaring, no dagger looks or anything. It was partly the swipes he made.

When Joan Burton piped up when he was in full flow, he ripped back that she would have to make up her mind if she was a heckler or a politician.

He muttered something about “activities” (the old slur on the Worker’s party) when Pat Rabbitte scored a couple of points abut his poor defence of the National Transport Plan.

But mostly it was his mispronunciations. The angrier Ahern is, the more jumbled his words. At one stage he talked about buses for Iarnród Eireann. He defended the number of buses in the fleet of an entity called Dublin Eireann. He had a heck of a problem getting his tongue around “due diligence.” And one of the new Luas stops is Cherrymount (he meant Cherrywood).

It was raucous stuff, that had a bit of an edge about it from the start. Fine Gael deputy leader Richard Bruton (standing in for Enda Kenny who is off saving Irish immigrants in New York) went at him hammer and tongs from the off.

His spiel was that every family in the country will have to stump up €25,000, yet we don’t know how much anything will cost, when projects will start, and which of them will be PPPs.

Ahern’s defence was that if the Government showed its hand, it would be giving out “commercially sensitive” information that would know contractors how much they could squeeze out of the national coffers.

Then the ding-dong started.

An elaborate sham, said Bruton. Showing his hand alright and in it is a card to get out of jail.

Soon Ahern was sledging back. “I did see the senior members of the Labour Party driving a bus around the city yesterday. It was not much of a bus,” he snorted.

It was actually an admobile (which is even less dignified than a battered bus).

The bus got Pat Rabbitte going. He said that Martin Cullen had sanctioned 20 new buses in the Transport plan. That were the same 20 buses that were sanctioned last year, he said, to replace 20 clapped out buses.

Cullen was “as brazen as you like” before he accused him a barefaced lie.

Not allowed, intervened the Ceann Comhairle.

And so a barefaced lie was downgraded to a blatant untruth.

More ding-dong between Ahern and Rabbitte over buses.

No additional ones since 2001, said Rabbitte. Loads of them, said Ahern.

The Rabbitte version: Wasters. Shams. Media stunts. Cloud Cuckooland.

Ahern’s version: A sad day when they end up whingeing on about some broken buses somewhere.

Rabbitte reworked a cliche nicely. “It’s a big hole that you are building but not big enough for an underground.”

Ahern shot back: “I will ignore the political point made very poorly by Deputy Rabbitte.”

It’s going to be a long November.