Curtain closes on one hell of a non-performance

HE never glanced up. Never. It was head down all the way. No telling glances across at the opposition. No gesture to hammer home a point. Not a single behaviour that the camera would like.

Bertie Ahern stood up in Leinster House yesterday and read an essay. A tightly constructed essay, filled with data. Pocket-calculator data: “At the time I lodged this money into my account, on 11 October 1994, the sterling/punt exchange rate was 0.9883. The sterling equivalent of Irish £7,938.49 was circa sterling £7,845.61.”

If it was data-rich, it was also rich in tax details and quotations from legislation and guidelines about the receiving of gifts.

Which made it all the more extraordinary that, within minutes of the start, viewers and listeners were looking at each other and deciding that this wasn’t the grovelling apology they assumed Michael McDowell would have beaten out of the Taoiseach. They weren’t sure exactly what it was, but it definitely wasn’t shaping up to be what they had expected. In fact, there seemed to be some doubt that an apology of any kind would emerge. When it did surface, it was Bertie saying sorry for not being a prophet who could see the hassle doing what he’d done would cause himself, his family, his friends and the general public.

Bits of the essay were impenetrable. Bits of it were unpronounceable. But the direction and intent were inescapable. This was no mea culpa. This was Bertie Ahern setting out to state, in dogged detail, the evidence he believes supports his claim to have done nothing wrong, broken no law, breached no ethical guidelines.

The TV cameras might not have been there, for all the attention he paid them. The opposition, ditto. The habits of the old parliamentarian came to the fore: if a glance away from the script was called for, that glance was going in the direction of the Ceann Comhairle and nobody else.

The body language interpreters got no value from him, either. The voice was strong, the hands didn’t shake and he was as orderly as Hercule Poirot in the way he placed the discarded pages on the surface in front of him, in serried ranks, every one of them face down.

It wasn’t a performance. But it was one hell of a non-performance.

Then came the turn of the opposition, and a right lemon they got handed, procedurally. They could question, but not interrogate. Now, the reality is that every police force in the world and every good broadcast interviewer in the world succeeds because they interrogate, rather than merely question. Interrogation requires the capacity to stop the speaker mid-sentence and go “Whoa. What precisely is meant by that phrase?” The opposition couldn’t do that yesterday. Interrogation allows the interrogator to hop back and forth in the speaker’s story, so they lose the thread, if that story is fabricated. The opposition couldn’t do that yesterday.

Instead, they could make a speech and stick a hanging basket of questions at the end of it.

But what speeches they made. The end of Enda Kenny’s tour de force collided with the clock and the Ceann Comhairle, but up to that point, he had gone a long way to revive the oratory absent for years from Leinster House and to establish himself as a man of conviction. He wasn’t having any of the suggestions that the opposition had gone poking their noses into Bertie’s private life. On the contrary, he said, it was Bertie and his own lads who had brought his private life into the discussion in the first place.

When Pat Rabbitte stood up, the contrast between his delivery and speech-structure and that of Kenny was marked — but so, too, were the links and the references to Kenny’s points. Rabbitte was quotable: where, he asked did the €50,000 stay if the Taoiseach didn’t have a bank account into which to put it? Into a sock in the hot press? Rabbitte got up close and personal, thumping the Tánaiste and eight named ministers, having given NCB a swift poke in the eye over the company cheque and reminding everybody of the State appointments NCB has won down the years.

While they talked, the Taoiseach sat, head tilted so the camera got an unrevealing shot of the top of his head. He made notes in a spiral-bound jotter. What was most interesting about the notes was that they were continuous. Nobody was going to see him react to any question.

Then he stood up to respond — and we saw a different Bertie. Different voice quality: all soft and breathy, in sharp contrast to the vocal tone of the essay-reading. Different body language: head up, nodding towards individuals, hands sketching out distances and amounts. Different attitude: more than once, he commented on the fairness of questions put by the opposition. For the most part, though, he liquidised those questions into a set of issues to be addressed whatever way he wanted to address them.

Finally came the applause. Heartfelt from his own: our boy did better than we thought he’d do, and no matter how much media wants to nibble at his posterior, the public had had this issue up to the eyeballs. Relieved (although not unanimous) from the PDs: this is done and dusted and we have time to prepare for an election.

Closure? Probably not. But it was a great display of parliamentary skills.

On all sides.