AP News, October 7th, 2007
Can Bertie Ahern take the money and just keep running?
Ireland's popular prime minister, credited with economic good times at home and peace in neighboring Northern Ireland, has admitted to a judicial probe he collected secret cash from dozens of businessmen _ and offered explanations that few believe.
But Bertie, a politician on first-name terms with his nation, has survived thanks to a rare alchemy of back-room brains and common-touch charm. His feat reveals as much about Ireland's attitudes to political ethics as it does about its Teflon-coated leader.
Ahern has just spent four days in the dock answering questions from a decade-old corruption tribunal. His testimony, widely described as confused and implausible, triggered the first parliamentary no-confidence vote in Ahern's leadership since his 1997 rise to power. He survived in an 81-76 vote.
On the streets last week as Ahern pressed the flesh, nobody challenged his right to stay as "taoiseach" _ pronounced "TEE-shuck" and meaning "chief" _ the formal Gaelic title of prime minister. Instead they posed for cell-phone pictures, shouted "Go on, Bertie!" and gossiped sympathetically about his predicament.
"At the end of the day, he's just a human being of flesh and blood like the rest of us," said Barry McDonagh, a tire fitter whose work-blackened hands had just clasped Ahern's. "You can't begrudge the man for trying to keep money from the lawyers and the taxman. Sure I'd do the same if I had his friends."
Investigators have spent years probing a London property developer's claim that Ahern received two payments in Irish pounds worth about $140,000 from a rival developer in 1989 and 1992. Ahern denies this.
The prime minister says he dealt exclusively in cash and kept no personal bank accounts from 1987 to 1993, a period when he served as labor minister and finance minister on a $75,000 annual salary, and as treasurer of Fianna Fail, Ireland's perennial No. 1 party. He has testified he cashed his paychecks and kept the money in his office safe.
The investigation has focused on five cash deposits totaling more than $140,000 that landed in newly opened bank accounts in both the name of Ahern and his then-girlfriend, from December 1993 to January 1995.
Ahern's lawyers tried but failed to prevent an investigation of these mysterious deposits, arguing they happened too long after the alleged payments from the property developer.
Ordered to comply, Ahern has maintained that business supporters, without his solicitation, gave him cash so that he could rebuild his life and acquire a new Dublin home following his 1987 marital separation.
He describes the donors as friends who received no favors in return _ yet claims not to know who many of them are. The funds he says he received in Ireland were loans, which would make them tax free, while money collected from English supporters was gifts, also tax free.
Ahern's inability to identify many donors, and his pleas of poverty, offer tasty fodder for comedians.
"I was only minister of finance and I had nothing. The only furniture we had was the three safes," deadpanned Packie O'Callaghan, a political satirist on state-funded broadcaster RTE, in a monologue in the urban Dublin accent of Ahern.
In his latest explanation, a letter to the Irish people published Sept. 30, Ahern said wealthy well-wishers gave him money in the months following the 1993 conclusion of his marital separation proceedings in court.
That position, analysts say, plays to public sympathy but is also ethically dubious, sounding close to admitting he hid money from his wife's lawyers and Ireland's Family Court.
"Many who have gone through the trauma of marital separation and legal proceedings will understand the position I was in," Ahern wrote. "Mine was not a perfect life, nor a perfect family and matrimonial environment, but as I emerged from that period I was assisted by friends who I later repaid in full with interest."
Ahern didn't mention that he repaid nothing until the investigation's digging was splashed on the front page of the Irish Times last year.
Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole said Ireland has never produced a politician so widely disbelieved, yet so sincerely liked.
"His position of saying, 'Don't hit me with this broken marriage in my arms!' is very clever. It works in Ireland, because there's a strange reticence about prying into people's private lives," O'Toole said.
Rather than high-minded statesmen, Irish voters prefer a politician who can deliver benefits to them, he said. Their view is, "if my politician's a rogue, that's fine _ the skills he uses to feather his own nest will feather mine too."
