Blind spots a symptom of being lost on Bertie Island

HELP! Our truth-seeking Taoiseach is missing in the news jungle withonly a hugely expensive, full-time team of lackeys in his media monitoring unit to try and keep him abreast of what’s going on.

Despite six civil servants working 18 hours a day at a cost to taxpayers of €400,000 a year, the unit is clearly not on top of the job if Mr Ahern’s curious current affairs blind spots are anything to go by.

Poor Bertie is lost on a little island of his own where the Irish Press is still in business and people are getting used to new technologies like “cassettes”.

Just like on the real Lost, Bertie is aware he is being watched by the Others, and is deeply suspicious.

Occasionally, a mystery plane flies overhead and drops a bundle of Irish Examiners on Bertie Island, so he and his ministers can get a brief glimpse of what is going on in the real world.

Strangely, the air drop from the media monitoring unit went fine on June 11 and 12 this year, but failed completely on the 13th. Unfortunately, this was the day the Examiner broke the story about the Aer Lingus threat to Shannon — thus leaving the Taoiseach in the dark about what later exploded into the government crisis of the summer.

Not a great return for €400,000, but as the Taoiseach said, the unit does its best to keep him up to date on what’s in the Examiner, Times and the Irish Press — a neat trick given the latter went out of print in 1995.

Labour leader Eamon Gilmore queried whether it might be more efficient for someone to browse the internet for a few minutes a day to provide a similarly superficial service at a fraction of the cost.

The Shannon slip-up, and Health Minister Mary Harney’s insistence she was unaware of early media reports regarding fears over ultrasounds at Portlaoise, led Mr Gilmore to expand on his theme and suggest maybe the media unit’s billing as a disseminator of news was just a front for spooks doing Bertie’s bidding at taxpayers’ expense.

The suspicious socialist wondered if its real role was as a publicly funded politicised tool set up to keep tabs on Government critics like cancer specialist John Crown.

The mere mention of Mr Crown’s name sent Mr Ahern into such a rage he turned on Mr Gilmore as if admonishing a small boy, warning him to take time to think about how he was going to apologise for his “slur” against civil servants, and then barking: “The deputy will answer when I finish.”

Oddly, the Taoiseach has never felt the need to display this level of public anger about the appalling systematic failures in cancer services.

Proving again that Bertie Island is a strange land of which we know little.