Rocky road for car crash Callely

FORMER junior roads minister Ivor Callely has always had something of the one-man political car crash about him.

Most politicians finding their backs against the wall quote philosophers — in a similar position Callely quoted Kung Fu Panda, an overweight panda with delusions about his ability in a Disney animated movie.

“Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery,” the then senator told a probe launched by the upper house into his affairs in 2010.

But, unfortunately for Callely, yesterday was not the end of history as he was released on bail after being hauled before the Dublin District Court on fraud offences, and told he must return there next week.

It is the latest chapter in a kaleidoscope career of colour. Rewind to budget day Dec 2005 when the set-piece parliamentary event of the year vied for attention with Callely’s spectacular fall from ministerial office.

It took an emergency Cabinet meeting to get rid of him that time as his exit from his junior transport post proved one of the most shambolic of recent years.

Three telephone calls from Bertie Ahern were needed to get Callely to accept the inevitable, and even as his resignation letter was being faxed to the Taoiseach’s office, Ivor was on national radio denying he had actually resigned.

But, of course, none of it was Callely’s fault. The fact a developer had decorated the TD’s home for free was not the issue, he insisted — it was all down to a “sinister” campaign to remove him from power, he announced, before slipping in the intriguingly self-effacing remark: “I certainly have — I believe — skeletons in my cupboard the same as everybody else. Is there anybody out there who doesn’t?”

Whatever skeletons he was alluding to stayed hidden, but Callely himself was soon a political corpse when the 2007 general election came around.

Despite the chaos of his resignation 18 months earlier, old buddy Bertie Ahern elevated Callely to the Seanad. And Ivor would later use the fact the Taoiseach informed him of this via a letter to his Bantry Bay holiday home as part of his assertion that it was indeed his primary residence when questions were first raised about why a senator whose family home was a few miles from Leinster House had claimed €81,015 in allowances for road trips to West Cork.

When Callely was brought before the Seanad’s toothless watchdog committee investigating his travel expense claims he gave a bizarre performance where his rambling stream of consciousness evidence veered between arrogance, self-pity, and the downright embarrassing.

At one point he compared himself to St Francis of Assisi, before musing on how well respected he was internationally, then passing into the general lexicon the now notorious Kung Fu Panda quote.

His peers delivered a quietly damning opinion on his “deliberate misrepresentation” of his primary residence, and suspended him for 20 days.

Callely challenged the decision in the High Court the following year when judges found in his favour and awarded him €17,000 for “loss of earnings”.

Another brush with fame concerned an odd little incident when gardaí questioned him in Jul 2009 after his yacht was involved in a reported hit and run with other boats at Baltimore.

His yacht Serendipity II reportedly collided with two vessels and caused €40,000 worth of damage. When he was tracked down, Callely helped with inquiries and passed on his insurance details.

One account at the time suggested the senator had been clad in a kimono when the gardaí came knocking, so even then it seems he was a fan of a Eastern philosophy.