The trick and trap of Da Bertie Code

Political Correspondent Shaun Connolly says the blade may be about to fall on Ahern.

THE end is nigh for Bertie Ahern.

His 13th and final day in the Mahon corruption probe witness box saw him deliver a parting shot to his tormentor, tribunal counsel Des O’Neill, whom he accused of continually trying to “trick and trap” him.

At least Mr Ahern was consistent to the last as he has often talked of nothing but “trick and trap” in his evidence — or a four letter word rhyming with it anyway.

He was at it again on the steps of the tribunal as he slipped into the Da Bertie Code once more with barely comprehensible talk of vast conspiracies and people out to get him.

Who? “Start at the start and work it all out,” he whispered like some misfiring mystic.

Sorry Bertie, even The Beatles would never dare claim: “We Can Work It Out” confronted with the stinking pile of trick and trap you have dumped in your wake.

Hostile agenda or not, at least Mr O’Neill tried to make sense of it all as he weaved a masterful thread through all those cash lodgements, and all those meetings with developers about all those stadiums, shopping malls and casinos.

He queried why each meeting would seem to elicit hope in the business types present and then there would follow a cash lodgement into one of Mr Ahern’s twenty plus bank accounts sometime within the next month.

Trick and trap! screamed Mr Ahern, as he implored some eight times he never took a “back-hander”, “fixer” or “bribe” in his forty years “busting a gut” for the little guy. He never quite managed the immortal Nixonian line “I. Am. Not. A. Crook,” but that’s what he meant.

All that cash flowing into his bank accounts? Two and a half times his known income in one twelve month period? How could we doubt him?

And how can we argue with explanations like; “I won it on the gee gees”, “These men I didn’t really know made me take it in Manchester”, “It was from two spontaneous dig outs a year apart from two separate sets of friends who had no knowledge of each other but wanted to give the finance minister enough for a deposit on a little house” — even though he had enough cash in his St Luke’s safe to buy said house in one go.

As Mr Ahern says — it is a load of old trick and trap.

Mr Ahern informed us he was against giving tax breaks to shopping malls, apart from Tallaght, which he said was an urban giant allowed to sprawl without a heart which needed a social focus.

Which brings us to the real reason for the tribunal into Certain Planning Matters and Payments — the scars across this country of badly-conceived, traffic jam-rammed roads leading to soulless, over-priced housing projects allowed to rise with no shops, schools or sense of community because some councillor, TD, or even minister took a back-hander sometime.

Mr Ahern cut a disgruntled figure as he left Dublin Castle in the drizzle.

The colour writers waited at the bottom of the public guillotine, knitting their words, wondering if the soon-to-fall blade would be razor sharp like the one that finally did for Charles Haughey’s reputation, or blunt like the one which delivered the anti-climax of the beef tribunal.