Walk on by Citizen Bertie

The passport story allowed the Taoiseach’s extraordinary U-turn to slip back

AT the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal Bill Clinton still had the nerve to say that even presidents have the right to a private life.

That assertion would have been perfectly fine if he hadn’t just seduced the work experience girl in the Oval Office and then blatantly lied about it after hypocritically exploiting the image of being a loving family man whose marriage was back on track.

Bertie Ahern’s woes are centred on money rather than sex, but he maintains a similar Clintonesque line of defence in that he must be treated as a private citizen when it suits him.

The growing, and mainly self-fuelled, confusion regarding his tax status could be easily cleared up by Mr Ahern allowing the Revenue to make a crisp and concise statement about what exactly is going on.

Given the seriousness of the implied accusation from opposition parties that Mr Ahern may have fallen foul of the law in his obtaining of a tax clearance certificate after the 2002 election, it must strike a lot of people as curious that the Taoiseach does not want to stop such insinuations in their tracks if he can.

However, back comes the mantra from Mr Ahern that he must be treated just like every other citizen, which is also deftly used to parody Fine Gael claims that the Taoiseach thinks there is one tax law for him and another for everyone else.

As head of government, it is obtuse for Mr Ahern to be nominally in charge of the Revenue and explicitly expect all other citizens to obey tax laws, when a serious question mark remains over his own financial relationship with the Revenue.

Does anyone really believe the rest of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s career would be measured in anything other than hours if similar allegations were levelled against him and he hid behind a “Don’t ask me about it, I’m just one of the little people like everyone else” defence?

But then Mr Brown doesn’t have Fine Gael as an opposition. The fact the Taoiseach failed to mention he had fast-tracked a passport for controversial developer, Norman Turner, while finance minister, was a deeply uncomfortable new development for him to deal with, but Fine Gael did Mr Ahern a favour by releasing the information on the day of the Taoiseach’s humiliating reversal of everything he had previously said regarding his position with the Revenue and the Mahon corruption probe.

The passport story took over and allowed the Taoiseach’s extraordinary U-turn to slip back.

Enda Kenny made a second tactical mistake yesterday by demanding the Mahon Tribunal calls Mr Turner as a witness. A move which allows Fianna Fáil to insist the investigation is being leant on by the opposition parties who see it as nothing more than a political show trial.

I met President Clinton once, just after he survived his own show trial. Everyone knows the stuff about his neat little routine of locking on to a person and making them feel like they are the only person in the world that matters to him for that minute, and I was determined not to fall for it.

Then the moment came, and though I knew he was using me — though obviously in a very different way to Monica — I didn’t care, it just felt so damn good.

Irish voters often seem to have felt the same way about Mr Ahern in the past, but a spate of opinion polls now show that moment may well be over, thus hastening his return to the anonymity of the private citizen he so craves whenever his tax status is ever mentioned.

Be careful what you wish for Taoiseach.