Blair and Bertie, give us a break

Michael Clifford (Opinion, Nov 4) expounds freely (and accurately) on the debilitating legacy that haunts the ‘bould Bertie, long after his deserved demise in a whirlpool of shame.

Even Alistair Campbell who has spun many a tall-tale makes no inroads on the jaundiced public opinion of our recent Taoiseach of cunning.

Clifford’s coupling of Bertie with the vacuous Blair parallels the two imposters with many opposite comparisons, highlighting the one big difference — Tony-speak was comprehensible, though shallow. Whereas Bertie hogged the soundbites with a clatter of vacuous gibberish. Both played to their media audiences with dedicated idiosyncratic aplomb. The opportunistic machinations which preoccupied both men far outweigh their well-documented commitment to the peace process. The fact that they were the final cogs to appear in a long line of ‘peacemakers’, gives them no particular special right of profile.

Bertie was simply a dedicated lifer for personal vote aggrandisement, not directed for national well-being but solely for ‘Bertie-boost’. Learning his trade from the lap of his erstwhile master, an t-uasal Haughey, he made a clear pact with his personalised Drumcondra troika that he was going for a three-term ‘Taoiseach-ric’, come hell or high water. Unfortunately both hell and high water materialised.

His capacity for contriving fudged agreements and tenuous arrangements which were massaged to suit everyone (and eventually no-one), had a unidirectional intention focused solely on his own successful survival. His Dublin ‘boy-done-good ‘ image was fastidiously honed to ensure his thumping Dublin North Central vote tally, irrespective of how many little local strokes were required to top the poll.

Alistair Campbell is, of course, on his own book-flogging trail, trying hard to resurrect a falsity from a fallacy, that these pair of politicians were nobly doing their selfless bit in service of the needy collective masses. With PJ Mara throwing in his tuppeny defence of Ahern, one suspects a strong whiff of compromised ‘rodency’, although that shouldn’t upset Alistair too much.

Iraqi chaos and the troika’s visit lend the lie to any pseudo-aggrandising legacy of either Blair or Aherne.

Jim Cosgrove

Lismore

Co Waterford