Bertie the dark horse? I wouldn’t bet on it

BERTIE AHERN either has a very lucky touch with the gee-gees or his tribunal evidence is made up of the stuff horses leave behind them on the ground.

Unfortunately, the bouts of sustained laughter from the public gallery that greeted his testimony did not bode well for belief in his gambling skills.

The odds were always going to be long on Mr Ahern coming up with a convincing explanation as to why he said only wages went into his Irish Permanent accounts when, in fact, a large wodge of sterling did, but few would have backed the tired old nag he tried to make a break for it on yesterday.

It turns out Bertie is the bookies’ worst nightmare, he just has to look at a filly for it to romp home and shower him in (British) cash — some- times to the tune of £8,000.

Not only that, but he had forgotten about £15,000 — £18,000 sterling he’d been squirrelling away in his safe at St Luke’s, so he could invest in a tasty property development in Manchester.

He did not mention this before because he got it confused with the “float” he kept in the safe to fund his holidays and gambling sprees in England and so did not include it when he said his savings (at the time he shunned bank accounts) amounted to a mere £54,000.

Given that Bertie was effectively homeless at this point, it seems curious he should devote his efforts to buying a pad in Manchester — but then he knew that huge groaning safe in St Luke’s would be big enough to convert into a nice little family home should the need arise.

As we are all painfully aware, Bertie has never had much luck with property and the previously unknown Manchester deal fell by the wayside, so he decided to bung the cash he’d been converting into sterling for it into his new bank instead.

But, of course, he hadn’t done anything as simple as go to a bureau de change to switch the punts to pounds. Instead he had five or six informal transactions with Manchester businessman Tim Kilroe — no messy paperwork you see, and Mr Kilroe is now, unfortunately, dead so can’t confirm or deny any of it.

So, that’s all clear then. Except for the fact Bertie said the money was from wage cheques at the time and not from, as now claimed, money already saved — oh dear, hold on tight, here we go again on Bertie’s roller-coaster bank account ride.

Shame he did not tell his worried mates he had some 80 grand in savings, then they might not have forced him to take that embarrassing “dig-out” to help him put a roof over his head.

Of course, there is no paper trail for the said “dig-out” Bertie used to explain another lodgment of £22,500 sterling (oh, do keep up!) and tribunal counsel seemed to imply it may not really have taken place at all. How odd.

But then Bertie and his inquisitors have never been pals, indeed, Bertie told the men he branded “low-lifes” they had left him with no life and all that now filled his time was their probing.

“I think about it all day and every night,” he informed senior counsel Des O’Neill.

In an almost tender moment, Bertie told Des he saw his face whenever he thought of the tribunal, but the atmosphere soon turned sharply sour as Bertie exploded in rage at the way the inquiry had tried to “hang” his former secretary Gráinne Carruth.

Ms Carruth cut a sad figure as she was ripped apart while desperately trying to stay loyal to her former boss when forced to finally admit lodging sterling for him.

Bertie was livid in a TV interview after her appearance saying if the tribunal had “bothered” to tell him they had already proved the transactions were sterling he would have tried to stop her going into the witness box.

In fact, he had been informed of exactly that 11 days before she appeared and did not contact her or the tribunal to clear the matter up and spare the woman her agonising ordeal.

Bertie said he had been too busy to reply to the tribunal as he had been “fronting the country” at an EU summit.

And no one who has sat through the former taoiseach’s nine days of testimony to the tribunal could ever deny that he certainly has some front.

It was a shame he would not take questions from the press as he left Dublin Castle as we were all dying to know his top tip for the 3.15 at Cheltenham.

Could the former taoiseach’s crumbling credibility survive another day in the witness box like this? Even a lucky punter like Bertie would not dare bet on that.