Bertie’s gift saw him escape the blame

CECILIA AHERN’S latest novel is called The Gift. It is a work of fiction and not about her father, the former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, but he enjoys a rare political gift that even a novelist of Cecilia’s imagination would be hard-pressed to put down on paper without testing credulity too much.

He is lucky, almost beyond belief, as the budget emphasised, a gift his successor Brian Cowen and new Finance Minister Brian Lenihan must greatly envy because it has seemingly eluded them.

Ahern is lucky because he is not in charge of having to solve the current mess. Nor is he getting the blame in most quarters for creating it. He is extremely lucky that he was forced to depart his job — for unrelated reasons — before it became clear that the much-vaunted economy was banjaxed.