‘He didn’t do anything wrong’, chorus the parrots in subservience

BERTIE AHERN’S misfortune stemmed from a comatose loan that was awakened anonymously and revealed to the Irish Times.

The Tánaiste, Justice Minister and leader of the Progressive Democrats, Michael McDowell, was like a nodding dog on the rear window of the Fianna Fáil car for a while.

He seemed to just sit there and said nothing, despite the fact the political world was falling in on the leader of his coalition Government.

The minister’s thoughts on the matter were awaited almost as expectantly as the Taoiseach’s public explanation. As soon as the latter announced that he would address the nation on Tuesday’s 6pm news on RTÉ, Mr McDowell rediscovered his power of speech.

However, it was only very briefly. He managed a soundbyte to the effect that he had confidence in the Taoiseach’s accountability, honesty and integrity, and he wanted to give him space because of the personal circumstances.

He certainly gave him space — days of it, in which he had said nothing. The Justice Minister was probably preoccupied with the price of land, more especially that on which his new prison at Thornton Hall is to be built.

Instead of paying almost €30 million for the site — for the site, not the prison — the land could have been bought for half that price, according to the Auditor and Comptroller General. Nevertheless, the Justice Department went public about the purchase.

When he did finally speak, the caveat that it was “an error of judgment”, became “very significant matters of concern” and Bertie Ahern began to look like a Manchester martyr.

There was also a perverse touch of Manuel, the waiter from Fawlty Towers, about the entire Government, including the Progressive Democrats, in their collective support, or silent approval, of the Taoiseach for six days.

Their universal “I know nothing” attitude was only outmatched by the embarrassing subservience of their Fianna Fáil Cabinet colleagues who sounded like parrots in their denial that the Taoiseach had done nothing wrong. Of course he did.

He took the equivalent of €50,000 — now worth €70,000 if you include interest — from his rich buddies, at a time when he was Finance Minister.

He would have the rest of us believe we are a nation of morons because he repeated again and again, publicly, that he had done nothing wrong. He said it so often that he probably believes there is a difference between an office-holder who accepts millions, or one who accepts hundreds of thousands, and himself, who merely accepted tens of thousands.

Only, of course, he did not describe what he pocketed as tens of thousands.

He dismissed, euphemistically, what he took as almost an irrelevantly small amount. In 1993, €50,000 was not small, no more than it is a small amount today.

Whether it was millions, hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands, the principle of an office-holder taking money is exactly the same. In his case, it was just a matter of degree.

Mr Ahern introduced the matter of his separation as the reason why he took the money in the first place, and people have been tip-toeing around it and at pains to apologetically avoid this subject, despite the fact Bertie himself brought it up.

That is, everyone except about half of his Cabinet, who used the misfortune of the man’s broken marriage as an excuse for ignoring the standards of probity he insisted on others abiding by. He even went on television to justify a broken marriage as the reason for his ‘debt of honour’ and he emotionally tried to engage the sympathy of the nation.

Bertie Ahern is not the first to be separated, or divorced, and most certainly not the first Cabinet member to find himself in that position.

Although, as far as I know, he is the first member of Cabinet to have taken money because of what was a very upsetting and traumatic period of his life.

Apart from the €50,000, I can empathise with him, having been down that road myself — and so can thousands of others, who, like him, lost their homes.

Most of them would have had nothing like the income, or perks, of a senior Government minister, and certainly not the opportunity to earn the equivalent of €8,000 from doing a gig, or maybe it was a series of them. In any case, he may have been somewhat too revealing in that regard and may end up a Manchester martyr.

Nor would they have had a nice coterie of rich friends to organise £39,000, or €50,000, as a ‘debt of honour’, which has never been repaid, as Bertie Ahern has admitted.

Six of those friends, however, were appointed to State boards, not because of their generosity, but because they were friends of his, so Bertie maintains.

In the vast majority of cases, best friends would be able to put you up for a while, might even be able to tide you over with a small loan if needed, but it would be small and definitely repayable.

Up to that time, he managed to do something else many ordinary people couldn’t have done: he managed to save €50,000.

That money went towards setting aside an education fund for his children and paying off bills — but in doing that he was luckier than most others without their own roof over their head.

Bertie Ahern was not a poor man, at least not in the conventional sense.

As Labour leader Pat Rabbitte pointed out, Bertie has not had to put his hand in his pocket on a garage forecourt since 1987.

At the time he took the €50,000, at least part of which he used to pay off his bank loan, or some of it, his accumulated salary as finance minister would have been about €89,460.

A few years after the separation, as he said himself, he bought a house for €200,000. He opened an account in his own name after he and his wife separated and was able to save. And why couldn’t he? After all, he was in a highly paid ministerial job, from which he progressed to become Taoiseach and now earns €250,000.

Very few people who have gone through the awful trauma that is separation or divorce would not — could not — recover financially as he did, or as fast.