Autumn may be here, cold winds may be blowing, the Irish football team may be down and out, there may be a global financial crisis and foot and mouth disease is back. The Dublin Fringe Festival is on and The Sopranos are over. But there’s only one story in town this week and that’s Bertie Ahern at the Mahon Tribunal.
It’s been a long time coming, longer than the Theatre Festival. Not soon enough, says himself, I wanted to do this months ago. The anticipation is huge.
The press and political class are beside themselves. They are foaming at the mouth. The scheming, the intrigue, the gossip… and that’s just about going to hear it! Like Cork glitterati in the weeks before ‘jezz’ comes to town or Belfast cowboys contemplating Bruce’s coming concert, it’s only massive.
Plots and counterplots abound. There’s intrigue and loyalty and treachery. As in the Harry Potter series, each module of the Tribunal introduces new characters. Some, like James Gogarty, become folk heroes, with even their most mundane utterances repeated like ancient pearls of wisdom. Will we fuck.
There be baddies too, like Ray Burke. And milling through the throng are the builders and bankers, the butchers and bakers, the suits in cahoots, the friends indeed.
The present run has given us Paddy the Plasterer and the Manchester businessmen who gathered to share Bertie’s thoughts after a match at Old Trafford, as you do. They organised a dig-out, passing the hat to help Bertie in his hour of need, as his marriage broke up and he was out of house and home.
Now we’ve met Michael Wall, one of the Manchester businessmen. A pal and a man of few words.
But such scenes as he described! Jaw-dropping, one person said. He emptied his safe in Manchester of about £30,000 to come to a fundraiser for Mr Ahern’s constituency. He stayed in the Ashling Hotel, where he left the money in a briefcase in the wardrobe while attending the function!
Jaysus! The mind boggles. He spent £2000 at the function. And later, apparently, he headed off to Bertie’s Drumcondra office and emptied it out in bundles on the table.
What an image!
Celia Larkin says she couldn’t say how much cash had been in the briefcase. No one counted the money and no receipt was given. And Wall says that Ahern and Larkin’s reaction was ‘normal’.
Normal!
Apparently, it was to add a conservatory to the house he owned and that Bertie Ahern rented at the time. That’s not as outlandish as it might be made to seem. But given Bertie was Minister for Finance at the time, it seems, well… a bit cavalier. He just took the money, without counting it, and put it in the safe…
The background, of course, is that Bertie Ahern’s marriage had broken up some time previously. He did not have an active bank account in his own name. It may well be that all this stuff was part of a stratagem to minimise his apparent assets at a time when they might be apportioned to his wife in a separation.
Who knows? If that was the case, it’s understandable if not particularly likeable. But it would take the monies beyond the terms of reference of the tribunal. The thing is, he can’t say it was so.
Ahern himself is insistent that he never took bribes and that the tribunal is following a trail set out by individuals inimical to him. But the tribunal, like the Terminator, just keeps rumbling on.
Whether the astronomical cost of the process repays us with blood sport is a moot point. Gut instinct says that there isn’t much to this strand of the story, but macho is as macho does and the tribunal doesn’t like anyone who doesn’t roll over. It’s an alpha thing.
Add the media who have circled Ahern before and you have a potent brew. They can go alpha too and they’re out to get Bertie. It’s not just business, though that’s the starting point, to raise hysteria and sales. No, it’s a bit personal for some journalists. And the rest probably just fancy a change.
This may be it, the point at which the jacket is revealed to be a duck’s back off which it all flows like water, at least until the tribunal report comes out. But to date the various tribunals’ reporting has been relatively easy. Villains have been easy to out. Not so now. Everyone is in much more ambiguous territory.
We can’t change the past but we can rewrite the future, and that’s what it’s all about. The cards will fall where they fall. The clock keeps ticking. Me? I just can’t get away from the image of tens of thousands of pounds being casually, even absent-mindedly, gathered up and stuck in a safe in Drumcondra.
For sure, you could hardly call it normal. Frankly, it’s… amazing.