Political hypocrisy has long history, but Bertie is guilty of much worse

Ahern left himself wide open to the suspicion that he was under obligation by appointing several people to State boards after they gave him money.

This compounded the original mistake with the result that his position as Taoiseach has become utterly untenable

MAJOR political scandals have rocked Irish politics since the foundation of the State. Many have been cynically exploited, so we should learn from past mistakes.

De Valera started the cynical opposition by harping for decades on the partition issue as a smokescreen. He told a private session of the Dáil as early as August 1921, before the Treaty negotiations, that they would have to accept partition or they would be making the same mistake with Northern unionists as the English had made with the rest of us.

During the Treaty debate, when Michael Collins challenged him to produce an alternative, Dev presented proposals that contained all of the Treaty’s partition clauses. “We will take the same things as agreed on there” in the Treaty, he told the Dáil. Partition had nothing to do with the controversy.

In 1931, de Valera sought to embarrass the government over the appointment of a Letitia Dunbar-Harrison as librarian in Co Mayo. She was a Protestant.

“I believe that every citizen in this country is entitled to his share of public appointments, and that there should not be discrimination on the ground of religion”, de Valera told the Dáil. “Religion should not be made an excuse for denying a person an appointment for which he or she was fully qualified.”

But then he went on to suggest that a Protestant librarian was not properly qualified to deal with Catholics, any more than a Protestant doctor would be qualified to deal with Catholic patients.

“If I thought that the principle that the librarian in a Catholic community should be Catholic was a new principle introduced merely to deny a Protestant an appointment, I should vote against it, but I know from my youth that it is not so. I say that if I had a vote on a local body, and if there were two qualified people who had to deal with a Catholic community, and if one was a Catholic and the other a Protestant, I would unhesitatingly vote for the Catholic”.

If those were his honest views, one could also say without hesitation that the Long Fellow was a bigot. But, in fact, he was just playing the role of a political hypocrite.

It was cynical, but it should be stressed that he behaved responsibly in this regard when he came to power. However, Fine Gael elements gave him some of his own medicine by secretly inciting the British to wage the Economic War for their own cynical purposes.

Later, when de Valera took brave stands at the League of Nations, they tried to undermine him in the same way. “They have tried to rally all our abysmal ignorance of foreign affairs against him”, wrote Seán Lester, the Irishman who went on to become the last secretary-general of the League of Nations.

Surely the opposition plumbed the depths of absurdity when the Fine Gael spokesman on Foreign Affairs — Desmond FitzGerald (Garret’s father) — attacked de Valera for having “implied criticism” of Nazi behaviour towards Jewish people. That took the biscuit.

During the Emergency years of the Second World War, Fine Gael adopted a principled stand in supporting the Government, and de Valera mended his own ways when he was back in opposition. During the Mother and Child controversy — the big political crisis of the 1950s — he insisted that he alone should speak for Fianna Fáil on the issue.

He astutely allowed members of the government parties to savage each other, while his total contribution to the debate was just six exquisitely chosen words at the very end: “I think, we have heard enough”, he said.

WE SHOULD have had enough of the cynical, destructive politics, but we had a few more rounds in the 1980s with the political posturing surrounding the gross economic mismanagement that resulted in much of a generation being forced to emigrate. Now we could be facing another slow burning political crisis over who gave Bertie Ahern money.

The whole thing is becoming reminiscent of the Watergate scandal, with new sensational developments every week. This week’s issue is not whether Norman Turner’s passport application was speeded up.

He is a successful businessman and we can be confident that he would never have been successful if he went around forking out $10,000 for something that he was entitled to in the first place. This is of no concern to the tribunal anyway as it is beyond its remit.

However, it is for the tribunal to decide whether Owen O’Callaghan ever gave money to Bertie Ahern. We know now that while finance minister, Ahern accepted money from so-called friends. Yet some of his vocal backers would like us to believe poor Bertie was in financial trouble at that time, even though he had £50,000 squirrelled away in cash. We have been getting a lot of blather about the cost of the Mahon Tribunal from people who go on to say we should suspend all judgment until it publishes its findings. We have already paid for another tribunal, but we are ignoring its findings. In August 1997, Judge Brian McCracken was blisteringly critical of Charles Haughey in his tribunal report. He concluded 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”.

Ahern was Taoiseach at the time of the report, and he warmly endorsed it. “The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone”, the Taoiseach said.

But he left himself wide open to the suspicion that he was under obligation by appointing several people to State boards after they gave him money. This compounded the original mistake with the result that his position as Taoiseach has become utterly untenable.

His defence of the appointments was pathetic. “I appointed them because they were friends, not because of anything they had given me”, he told Brian Dobson. Appointing people because they were his friends was a further abuse of office.

Whether he paid his appropriate taxes or got money from Owen O’Callaghan or anyone else is superfluous because we already know that he went over the top. Those other questions are about how far over the top? Most people already believe it is even worse than he has admitted.

Some 54% of the electorate do not believe Ahern’s sworn testimony at the tribunal. That has frightening implications for the integrity of our democracy.

In the wake of the Taoiseach’s pathetic performance at the Mahon Tribunal before Christmas, many cabinet ministers jumped to his defence by attacking the tribunal. During this week’s Dáil debate, however, Brian Cowen, Dermot Ahern, Seamus Brennan, Brian Lenihan and Dick Roche were conspicuous by their silence.

The Taoiseach was defended instead by Martin Cullen, whose standing is in storage with the voting machines, and Willie O’Dea, whose political credibility flew out of Shannon with Aer Lingus.

Was the silence of the big guns as significant as it was startling?