Miriam Lord: Bertie tells us of great injustice done to him

Is there anything to be said for another whip-around?

Anything at all?

Because a major injustice is going on here and it's only because Bertie Ahern is not a man of means. Whatever few bob he might have accumulated down through the years went on funding his epic David versus Goliath clash with the dastardly Mahon Tribunal.

That crowd had it in for him right from the start and he never realised it until they lured him into their lair in Dublin Castle and savaged him.

As you do.

Sure he only established the inquiry. How was he to know they had “the three judges, the huge legal team - the senior counsels, the junior counsels the legal researchers, the auditors and this whole machinery against me and they were a formidable well researched group who went on longer that two world wars”.

But he isn’t bitter and he doesn’t bear them any grudges.

Unfortunately, people have persisted in saying the most awful things about poor Bertie.

Who could not have been moved by his gut wrenching cri-de-coeur to Miriam O’Callaghan yesterday morning, when he explained why he has never taken proceedings against the nasty Mahon tribunal and all the other people who are intent on tormenting him?

We’re sure that Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin, for one, was in floods of tears as he listened to his former leader opening up his heart.

Thing is, some of the Bert’s generous benefactors have already been to the law to successfully vindicate their good name. But the former taoiseach says he can’t do this because it costs an awful lot of money to take on newspapers and the like.

This is a terrible pity as he clearly sees himself as a man who has been dreadfully wronged, yet can do nothing about it.

A bit like when he was in charge of the country and the economy was starting to spin out of control and there he was again, unable to do a blessed thing about it, a hamstrung taoiseach.

“I would have loved if someone somewhere could have told me what was going on in the banks,” he sighed in January of 2011, his last day in Dáil Éireann.

Although as he made clear to O’Callaghan yesterday, he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, because he could not concern himself with what went on in the Central Bank and the Regulators office.

He might have appointed directors to the bank’s board – one of them had even given him a dig-out, but they never told him nuttin.

And yet, a trip to the Round Hall is out of the question for Ahern.

“If you’re a wealthy person in this country, the courts is the place to go”, he said ruefully.

Thankfully though (and here, you could sense the relief in Bertie’s voice), at least he had enough in reserve a few years ago to hire an expert to show that there was never, ever, anything untoward going on with regard to his personal financial affairs – despite the best efforts of that malicious “tribuneral” to pretend otherwise.

“I proved beyond doubt, forensically proved, by probably by one of the best forensic accountants in the country, that what I had earned in net pay was more than I had spent and that the difference between the net pay and what went through my bank accounts was justified,” he explained to a drowsy nation wincing at the taste of morning toast smeared with hogwash.

“It cost me a lot of money to do that – and that whole thing cost me a lot of money – but I was able to prove it beyond doubt,” sniffed the Bert, having just arrived into studio from Cloud Cuckoo Land.

As Sunday breakfast radio goes, this latest edition of Sunday with Miriam was quite the shocker.

This was Bertie Ahern fresh from his appearance at the Banking Inquiry, anxious to build on what he considers was a successful outing, having “comprehensively” answered all the questions.

He manned up for Miriam. Yes, he and his colleagues in government might have handled the time leading up to the crash a little better.

Look at his autobiography. “It’s there for people to see that I accepted responsibility for the issues we were responsible to then . . . I was the head so I’ve never every shirked my responsibility for the areas I’m responsible for.”

(Which were few and far between, it seems.)

“We took, maybe, a few chances that went wrong.” He regrets the reliance on revenue from the construction and “we allowed competitiveness to drift.”

But when Miriam asked about the people having trusted him “to keep a steady ship and it crashed into an iceberg” the reply was vintage Bertie.

“Well, I’d left at that stage and I don’t blame anybody for that.”

In fairness, the blame for the economy’s spectacular nosedive into recession cannot be landed uniquely on Ahern’s doorstep. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t see the iceberg on the horizon and the opposition at the time were urging him to keep spending money. We know, though that he thinks he would have done a better job than his successor, even if he was throwing backhanded bouquets at everyone yesterday.

“You know, from a political point of view I would have managed the challenge. But, as we know, that’s life. It wasn’t to be” he wistfully opined after he was forced to resign because of his unbelievable evidence to the Mahon tribunal.

Ahern’s legacy has been very badly damaged by the tribunal. His insistence at the outset that he fully co-operated was quickly blown out of the water by the legal team.

His attempts to explain his byzantine financial affairs veered from farcical and risible to downright infuriating and insulting.

But there is more to that legacy and there is much for which he deserves justifiable credit.

Yesterday’s radio interview did that legacy no favours. His self-serving attacks on the tribunal and the media for reporting it showed a man wallowing in a deluded sense of victimhood.

Here he is on the reaction to the time he told the tribunal he won a particular amount of money on the horses.

So what if an independent tribunal of inquiry doesn’t believe him.

“If the chairman of the tribunal didn’t believe that, that’s his problem” says Ahern.

No. It’s your problem, Bertie. Always was, and sadly, it still is.