Bertie sings off cardinal’s hymn sheet

A GOOD sermon stays with a listener forever — but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Something in Bertie Ahern’s defence of his High Court challenge to the Mahon Tribunal yesterday rang very familiar. Something about the “my heart’s not in it but my hands are tied” attitude seemed like a rip-off of a recently read script.

And then the penny, or was it the dollar or pound, dropped. This was the same line and tone adopted by Cardinal Desmond Connell when he preached about the merits of blocking another state inquiry.

Summed up, it screamed: blame it on the lawyers, they made me do it, I had no say. Yes, the Taoiseach, like the cardinal, engages, instructs and pays a legal team but somehow, when it suits, the lawyers become the tail that wags the dog.

In Bertie’s case yesterday, the canine in question was a hangdog.

The Taoiseach adopted the look of a whipped puppy as he mingled with kids at the opening of a new all-weather soccer pitch in the Sheriff Street neighbourhood of inner city Dublin.

“Phew, those kids are fit,” he puffed after a kick-about with the under-12 girls during which he put in the kind of ponderous, flat-footed performance he had slated his Manchester United idols for at the weekend.

Perhaps he was struck by the perfect polytan surface beneath him, lovely, smooth, artificial grass that’s doesn’t scratch or scar and helps you bounce when you fall — a far cry from the rough terrain of politics.

Or maybe he knew that his prepared speech about being bound, gagged and coerced by teams of evil lawyers was already ill advised given that the news from the High Court was that the inspiration for his cardinalesque protestations had just backed down and agreed to let the inquiry annoying him to proceed unhindered.

Obviously the script from that revised sermon had not reached Government Buildings in time.