INSIDE POLIITICS - THIS WEEK'S COLUMN, ON BERTIE WHO ELSE!

There is a school of thought that if the report of the McCracken Tribunal into Charles Haughey’s venal trousering of other people’s money had come out a couple of months earlier, then politics would have had a different complexion over the past ten years.

The Report was published in August of 1997, over two months after the General Election of June 6. Some say that the findings of the report were so potentially catastrophic for Fianna Fail and for Bertie Ahern that if the report had been published before the election (in April or May of that year) that the three-party Rainbow coalition would comfortably have been returned to power.

I’m not so sure, not so sure at all. For one, Bertie Ahern was only a bit player in the saga surrounding payments to Charlie Haughey. Besides his little cameo (he unwittingly signing blank cheques for the party leader’s allowance) did not come to light until the Moriarty Tribunal began probing other aspects of Haughey’s personal finances.

There’s a well of forgiveness and understanding that exists in Irish society for public figures that just can’t be compared with any other democracy. My own instinct is that it’s because Ireland is a much smaller, more familiar, more intimate country than, say, Britain. And that people instinctually brand people who find themselves in sticky situations as ‘poor old divvils’ rather than ‘unmentionable so-and-sos’.

In Britain, we have seen so many ministers fall on their swords, sometimes for relatively minor transgressions. In Ireland, it needs to be in the neighbourhood of one of the seven deadly sins before it becomes career-threatening. And that's what happened to Haughey. He had long dried his well of understanding before he shuffled off this mortal coil. Posterity will recall some of his achievements but he will be primarily identified as a rogue.

The selfsame school of deep thought has made a return this week to ask the same ‘what if’ questions about Bertie Ahern. Would FF have saved the election if he had been called as a witness to the Tribunal earlier this year? Would he still be Taoiseach?

And of course, because he still is Taoiseach, there’s a second strand of reasoning. A couple of hits below the waterline might mean he will never make it to port. And this particular port of destination of course is September 2011 when Bertie Ahern reaches his 60th birthday. But of course nobody ever believed that this is feasible, that he will hand over the reins to the anointed one, Brian Cowen, eight or nine months shy of a general election.

In the best tradition of the ‘king is dead, long live the king’, there has been ongoing speculation about when Bertie Ahern will step down. Most predictions tend to hover around 2009 in or around the time of the local and European elections as a time of natural cleavage, to allow Ahern’s successor to bed himself or herself in.

The fly in the ointment is the planning tribunal and Bertie Ahern’s increasingly Byzantine explanations of those mysteriously big payments that went in and out of his account. The thinking has gone that if he fared badly at it and lost face, his tenure as leader of FF would come to an end within months.

For a long time, his Tribunal appearance looked like it would be a short sharp shock. But now it looks like it will grind on into another week, and that it will conclude just in time for the return of the Dáil and for an angry opposition to go onto the attack.

And it’s certain that he has shipped damage this week. His own protestation that he begged and pleaded and bended his knee to accommodate the Tribunal sounded a little bit hollow when Tribunal lawyer Des O’Neill made public a couple of home truths. To wit, he only made the Tribunal aware in April this year that there were foreign exchange transactions involved in three of the four lodgements being examined. He also, according to O’Neill, did not include all the relevant information (particularly the fact that Celia Larkin was operating an account on his behalf) in an affidavit of discovery. Also, yesterday morning, it became apparent that at a very early stage in the process, on New Year’s Even 2004, he himself identified all the payments totalling E85,000 which now form the basis of the inquiry into his finances but did not disclose that information to the Tribunal for a long time.

But the question remains: what will it take to down him? My own sense is that it would have to be enormous and that is not likely to happen. His famous Teflon will suffer some deep gouges this week but not enough to render him inoperable. The opposition will go after him.

But career-ending? It was wrong and unethical of him to take non-repayable repayable loans from friends, and a large sum from businessmen in Manchester. Especially since he was a high officer of State, the serving Minister for Finance. I, for one, think that taking money like that should be career-ending.

But I'm not the Irish public. And the Irish public have forgiven him, in opinion polls, elections, and – I’m sure – in opinion polls again. The Irish public has a very special relationship with its political head, that’s closer to the cult of personality found in the middle east and some South American countries. The blows to his credibility are undoubted. But ultimately they are glancing rather than fatal.

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE AHERN'S SECOND DAY AT MAHON

Those who work in the survival business – writers; sportspeople, actors and politicians - know that ultimately they are only as good as their last book, game, film or election.

Bertie Ahern is around enough to understand more than most what a precarious, dangerous and unpredictable business politics is. He will be well aware of Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failures, will have seen too many of his colleagues – Charlie Haughey, Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, Padraig Flynn, and Denis Foley – see their careers and reputations upended unceremoniously for them.

What is clear is that Bertie Ahern has himself taken a bit of a hiding this week.
What is more difficult to assess is the extent of the damage to his reputation and to his standing as Taoiseach. What is sure more he walks into booby traps at the Mahon Tribunal, the shorter his period as leader will be. But it is infuriatingly difficult to make any firm conclusions. We have seen him encounter crises like this before where he looked like a sure goner only for his popularity to go shooting up in opinion polls, or for FF to win elections.

What you can say with certainty is that he will be browned off that it did not finish last night as scheduled. Fianna Fail’s annual parliamentary party think-in begins in Monday. He would have wanted the Tribunal to have been behind him by then but instead for about the fifth time in a year, his personal finances will dominate the agenda at his party.

Amongst the scribes, the consensus on yesterday went as follow: He was damaged, that he an awful day, that some of the evidence was ruinous to him, that it was death by a thousand cuts etc. But I just couldn’t bring myself to agree with it? Sure it’s serious stuff. But given his Teflon knack in the past, it will have to be very serious to down him and until then, all FF ministers will stay loyal to him.

Having said that the stakes are very high indeed. Ahern’s explanation and clarifications of all the lodgements, the dig-out loans, the whip-arounds and the house purchase have been ropey. And that innate ropiness of his accounts has been exposed on a good few occasions by the persistent if sometimes monotonous questioning of Tribunal lawyer Des O’Neill.

As well, Ahern’s narrative has always been that he has fully complied and cooperated with the Tribunal. Yesterday, we had further reminders that the Tribunal’s own experience is at variance with this. As well as the lateness in disclosing foreign exchange reactions, it emerged yesterday failed in his obligation to include the fact of Celia Larkin’s involvement in an account operating to his benefit in an affidavit of discovery (that’s pretty serious)

Yesterday, after a day and a half of thoroughly exhaustive and exhausting preliminaries, the Tribunal finally turned its attention to the four specific lodgements, and the substantive issues surrounding Mr Ahern.

And the first that has come under scrutiny has been a lodgement of £24,838 in punts in October 1994. Ahern’s version of events is that this is primarily made up of two separate components – the second dig-out loan he got from friends totalling £16,500 in addition to the £8,000 sterling that he was handed after a whip-around by Manchester-based zillionaires sometime in 1994.

All very well until Tribunal lawyers began to do the maths and then discovered that the figures just didn’t tally. The exchange rates of the day just didn’t support the two sources that Ahern claimed for the money. In other words the sterling sum would have to be in pounds and pence.

When it did its own assessment, it found that the sum lodged of 24,838 exactly matched the money you would get if you exchanged £25,000 sterling. That was explosive stuff. If that was the case, it meant that the version of event that Bertie Ahern has put on the public record just wasn’t true, that there was no £8,000 sterling, no £16,500 and that his narrative was a fabrication and – well – a brazen bare-faced lie. And if that were true, or established, or proven, there would be no question but the Taoiseach would fall on his sword. He just couldn’t survive that, politically.

But there was one problem with this theory (and that’s what it is because there are no documents to back up this version of events; or indeed Ahern’s). It assumed that the bank teller had applied a rate that day that was for sums of £2,500 and below, rather than a more favourable rate for larger sums.

“You are saying a person going in with £25,000 gets a rate for £2,500 and is entirely screwed by the bank,” riposted Ahern to O’Neill.

The lawyer pointed out that the same rate for £2,500 was mistakenly applied for a sum of £20,000 Ahern deposited in December 1995, before it was corrected to the appropriate rate.

Hugely coincidental and all as it is, the theory still makes a huge assumption that the teller applied the wrong rate, either deliberately or mistakenly. And the December example isn’t compelling because the mistake was rectified by the bank at the time.

What was lacking yesterday were other comparitors. Surely, an exercise could have been conducted to see if the £2,500 rate was mistakenly applied to sums exchanged by other customers with large amounts around that time.

Overall, the Taoiseach has done himself no favours throughout the process. Everytime he explains, the sands shift a little bit more. A new detail is included. The story is tweaked to address a potential weakness in his version of events. There are new recollections.

There are parts of Bertie Ahern’s account that were not convincing when he first told it and are still not convincing a year later, notwithstanding all the tweaks, elaborations and clarifications.

And besides that, it was morally and ethically iffy for a Minister for Finance to take non-repayable repayable loans from friends and whip-arounds from Manchester businessmen. The sums of money involved were huge, especially if you are one of the little guys on the terraces. But having said all that, there are few who are as expert in the survival business as he is.