If it really were a republic, we’d be served better by our government
He said that it would have been better if he had told the truth.
Nobody should be surprised. Fianna Fáil has already been exposed as having lied shamelessly to the electorate in the run-up to last year's general election, but what was surprising was Enda Kenny's response to the latest deception.
If John Bruton had been leader, he would have been shouting for Bertie to resign, and for the Government to go to the country immediately. But Enda played it differently.
What was he doing? Refusing to allow the North to be used as a political football? Or saying in effect that everybody knows that current Government is full of liars, so why kick up a fuss?
In a republic, the people are the supreme authority. If we are to remain a republic, it is crucial that the electorate should insist on being properly informed and not misinformed the latter being the forte of this Government.
People may differ over who was our greatest leader since independence, but there can be little doubt that our greatest misleader has been Bertie Ahern. He wins hands down.
For decades following independence, Irish politics was primarily concerned with demonstrating that we really were independent.
WT Cosgrave's government was preoccupied with demonstrating our independence within the British Commonwealth, and his government played a major role in securing the Statute of Westminster, which formally acknowledged the independence of the dominions in 1931.
After coming to power the following year, Eamon de Valera explained that his policy was to ensure that no status or symbol conflicted with country's status as a sovereign nation.
"Let us remove these forms one by one," he told a gathering at Arbour Hill on April 23, 1933, "so that this State that we control may be a republic in fact and that, when the time comes, the proclaiming of the republic may involve no more than a ceremony, the formal confirmation of a status already attained."
When the Inter-Party government got into power in 1948, it formally declared the Republic of Ireland. This proved that de Valera had essentially fulfilled his 1933 promise, because the declaration merely changed the name and nothing else.
But then came the Mother and Child crisis in 1951 and suddenly, after Noel Browne published his ministerial correspondence with the bishops, we learned that this country was not really a republic at all.
The people did not have the ultimate say. Our politicians had betrayed democracy and the republic by allowing the country to develop into a kind of theocracy.
"All this matter was intended to be private and to be adjusted behind closed doors and was never intended to be the subject of public controversy," Taoiseach John A Costello told the Dáil during the Mother and Child controversy.
"All matters could have been, and ought to have been, dealt with calmly, in quiet and in council, without the public becoming aware of this matter."
"All of us in the Government who are Catholics are, as such, of course, bound to give obedience to the rulings of our Church and of our hierarchy," Seán MacBride, the Minister for External Affairs declared.
And he called himself a republican!
This controversy had arisen because Noel Browne insisted that all mothers and their children should be treated equally in an effort to bring down our infant mortality rate. This was a time when the Catholic Church had even less regard for women than it does now.
Even a married woman who bore her husband's child was somehow considered religiously unclean and had to be "churched".
And of course those who had children out of wedlock were regarded as being even worse. They were considered little more than helpless and their children were treated as bastards.
They weren't even properly educated. Instead, they were often used as slave labour by the institutions. They were the Irish equivalent to the black slaves in early 19th century America only this was happening here in the latter half of the 20th century.
There were undoubtedly many good people involved who did not abuse children, but they were betrayed by their own silence and by the criminal indifference of their superiors.
Last week Vincent Browne broadcast an interview with a woman who was reared in one of those orphanages after she was taken from her mother, who was herself incarcerated in a Magdalen laundry from which she repeatedly tried to escape, only to be returned by the gardaí.
On one occasion they handed her over to a local priest in Waterford, who raped and brutally beat her, before returning her to the laundry.
THIS week RTÉ's Prime Time had the story of Maynooth in the 1980s when some clerical students alleged that Monsignor Micheál Ledwith, a senior member of staff, was preying on students.
They warned a dean who passed on the information to some bishops including Cardinal Tomas Ó Fiaich and his successor, the Bishop of Down and Connor Cathal, now Cardinal, Daly.
Bishop Daly got "extremely angry" and told the students to go and pray, while Cardinal Ó Fiaich's response was essentially to shoot the messenger on behalf of the bishops.
The dean of the college, Fr Gerard McGinnity was asked to take a sabbatical and then removed from Maynooth, while Micheál Ledwith, the man against whom the accusations were made, was promoted to President of the College.
We don't know the whole story but what was utterly contemptible in this instance was the fact that the Church leaders did not bother to investigate the accusations. The first step should have been to interview those people who made the allegations. The Church's answer to preying was to call for praying.
For more than quarter of a century after the Mother and Child fiasco, the Catholic hierarchy continued to exert a virtual veto in Irish political life, frustrating the introduction of divorce, artificial contraception and protection against AIDS.
The first loosening of the Church's control was Charlie Haughey's 1979 solution to the contraception issue, when the law was changed to permit the sale of contraceptives for bona fide family planning purposes.
It was probably more than just a coincidence that Pope John Paul II chose this time to visit Ireland. He may have been largely instrumental in drawing back the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, but he bolstered those who sought to retain the iron curtain around the clerical abuse in this country.
The Pope was at his theatrical best in Galway with his two cheerleaders, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary.
Bishop Casey, whose behaviour was essentially normal, was later hung out to dry by the same people who went to extraordinary lengths to protect and even facilitate the perverts who sexually abused children. And our government handed the country over to those people!
For years now we have been witnessing the cost of tolerating lousy leadership within the Church of which most Irish people are members.
But we will all suffer the dire effects if we continue to bury our heads in the sand and tolerate the lies and misleading tactics of our current Government.
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