Ahern payments - Taoiseach is not a victim of the press

In his RTÉ interview on Tuesday evening, Bertie Ahern raised the Pied Piper analogy of up to 50 journalists pursing him in recent days. This amounted to a subliminal suggestion that those reporters doing their jobs were akin to rats. It was one of a number of aspects of his interview that provoked further questions.

The media have a duty to inform the public and to ensure that our political leaders are accountable for their actions. This is essential for the proper functioning of democracy.

When the story of Mr Ahern receiving payments first broke, he was patently disingenuous in refuting suggestions that he had received between €50,000 and €100,000. If he answered the questions truthfully in the first place, reporters would not have had to dig for that information. Instead, he talked about dirty, scurrilous and unjust insinuations.

“What I got personally in my life, to be frank with you, is none of your business,” he told reporters.

Members of the media are no different from anybody else. Ireland is a largely Christian society in which people are nurtured on a sense of tolerance and forgiveness. Mercifully, most people would have felt compassion for Mr Ahern in his television ordeal, and there should be no room for vindictiveness. Nobody would suggest that he is in politics for personal enrichment, because he has never exhibited the lavish lifestyle of at least one of his predecessors.

It may be valid to suggest that the amount of money was comparatively small in relation to the outrageous behaviour of late colleagues such as Charles Haughey and Liam Lawlor, but the sum amounted to more than most people in this country would have earned in a year of honest toil.

Mr Ahern said those who gave him the money neither sought nor received any political favours, but he did appoint five of them to State boards.

“I appointed them because they were friends, not because of anything they had given to me,” he said.

In August 1997 Mr Justice Brian McCracken concluded in his tribunal report that it was “quite unacceptable that a member of Dáil Éireann, and, in particular, a Cabinet minister and Taoiseach, should be supported in his personal lifestyle by gifts made to him personally”.

As Taoiseach at the time, Mr Ahern endorsed the tribunal findings, declaring: “The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone.”

Mr Ahern was setting standards for others, even though he knew that those were contradictory to his own previous behaviour.

At that point, at least, he should have repaid the money immediately, even if it required him to obtain a bank loan, like other people.

Characterising the money he received as a “debt of honour”, that would be repaid sometime in the indefinite future, is a haunting reprise of Charles Haughey’s similar characterisation of the £100,000 (€126,974) he promised to repay AIB, without subsequently ever making any attempt to do.

For Mr Ahern to suggest now that his friends would not accept repayment is a cop out. Surely he would have had no problem in convincing them of the political necessity of accepting repayment. His failure to repay the money in the circumstances betrayed an appalling lack of judgment.