Political integrity - Taoiseach’s character is not real issue

“IT IS not correct. If I said so I wasn’t correct. I can’t recall if I did say it, but if I, I, I did not say, or if I, I did say it, I didn’t mean to say it — that these issues could not be dealt with until the end of the Mahon Tribunal. That is not what Revenue said.”

THERE may be those who continue to believe — or wish they could still believe — that waffle like this from the Taoiseach in the Dáil on Wednesday represents an ordinary fella from Drumcondra getting just a bit flustered under unwarranted and politically motivated pressure.

They may even wish to believe that he was just embarrassed — and he should have been deeply so — by the magnitude of the U-turn he was forced to swallow on his travails with the tax man.

As poll after poll indicates those true believers are becoming as scared as Mr Ahern’s senior cabinet colleagues were during Wednesday’s opening exchanges on the Fine Gael motion which called on the Dáil to reaffirm its confidence in the Mahon Tribunal.

Being forced to acknowledge that the Revenue Commissioners may — or may decline to — issue him with a tax clearance certificate before the Mahon Tribunal concluded it business, is in direct and absolute contradiction to what he said just 10 days ago.

Our amazement will be tempered when we recall that this is the second U-turn our Taoiseach has been obliged to make in relation to his tax affairs.

In the Dáil in September, 2006, he said he didn’t have any tax liability and he had consulted with the “tax authorities”.

Less than two weeks before May’s election he was forced to admit that he was in contact with the Revenue Commissioners and had made a provisional payment — believed to be €70,000 — to cover any liabilities.

The revelations about a passport for a British businessman and donations to Fianna Fáil can only add to the snowballing and damaging story.

If this was a wet-behind-the-ears junior counsel stumbling through their first complicated court case it would be right to be forgiving but Mr Ahern has been Taoiseach for longer than anyone other than Éamon de Valera. He is also an accountant and has served as minister for finance.

New to the ways of the world he is not.

It is unimaginable that he thinks this kind of two-fingers-to-you buffoonery is acceptable or plausible to anyone other than a card-carrying Fianna Fáil lifer.

Those who have concluded that the late Mr Haughey was perceptive and presentiment when he described Mr Ahern as the “most cunning and the most devious” will not be at all surprised. They have watched Mr Ahern using strangled language and five-star ambiguity as a political dance of the seven veils for years.

Just as great leaders use the inspiring potential of language to lead and embolden a nation, Mr Ahern uses it to deflect and confuse. Just like the seducer with the seven veils, the art and purpose are in the suggestion, never in the substance.

Mr Ahern has been Taoiseach for over a decade and helped generate the resources that could have built world-class health and education systems; revolutionised our infrastructure and embedded a knowledge-based economy.

He could have presided over the public sector reform that he acknowledges is so vital; he could have pushed decentralisation.

He might even have put in train a policy that reflects the fact that we import the vast majority of our fuel and are a small — irrelevant in international energy terms — economy and that we live at the very end of the pipeline. Our education system is underfunded and below midway on the OECD ratings table. Our universities struggle to make Europe’s top 100.

Our health system is a divided, confused, inefficient and occasionally dangerous entity with whole sections for sale to the highest bidder.

Decentralisation and electronic voting turned out to be expensive jokes. The first round of benchmarking was paid without any of the significant public sector reform so vital to our future being delivered.

All of these substandard performances are having an impact and, as we reported earlier this week, emigration figures have returned to the highs of the ’80s and early ’90s — not all of these people left because they could not find work.

Many left because they could no longer pretend that this country was functioning as a caring, inclusive and progressive society. One where the function of governance was made plain through transparency rather than one where the remit of the Freedom of Information Act has been emasculated to keep secret ever more functions and functionaries of the state. All of these things happened on Mr Ahern’s watch, like it or not he is our chief executive and the buck stops at his desk.

Though he had a central role in the North’s peace process — an achievement any politician should be proud of — these are substantial indictments. Add to these the revelations and mystery surrounding his personal finances forced into the public view by the Mahon Tribunal and his position becomes untenable.

No matter how loudly or eloquently the rolled-out Martin Manseraghs of this world protest, what is at stake now is not the political career or reputation of an individual — it is the integrity of our political process.