Leak lands Bertie in deep end

BERTIE AHERN has spent the last two days wearing the riled face of a man who has been wronged. He has fumed that somebody has it in for him and has planted the political equivalent of an incendiary device just before the Dáil returns.

Very occasionally, Ahern has raw-nerve moments when he can hunch his anorak into a hoodie and send out a vibe of low-level and thin-lipped intimidation. This is one of them. He has condemned the leak in furious terms. But, as for the information itself, he has blanked and stonewalled. It is nobody’s business but his own, he says. He has no questions to answer. End of story.

But this particular story is only at its beginning. The problem for Ahern is that the wrong of the leak has been outranked by the greater wrong revealed by the leak; namely that Ahern accepted money from a small group of friends during his legal separation proceedings in late 1993.