Bertie Ahern’s Greatest Trick: Shaming the Shameless

My friend Ciaran Byrne is right: If Rupert Murdoch owned Fianna Fail he’d close it down. The Mahon Tribunal’s report into the flagrant corruption at the heart of the planning process in County Dublin is a very Irish scandal. It is not surprising that senior Fianna Fail politicians were on the take, yet the extent of their corruption remains revelatory. It’s GUBU for the Celtic Tiger era.

Now Bertie Ahern, the former Taoiseach once branded “the most skilfull, the most devious, the most cunning of them all” by Charlie Haughey (and he would know!), is set to be expelled from the party he dominated for a decade for “conduct unbecoming a member of Fianna Fail”. This is, in its way, an achievement to be ranked with any in a career as murky as it was successful. Too embarrassing for the unembarrassable Fianna Fail!

That said, the Mahon enquiry has not been able to substantiate allegations that Bertie was personally corrupt; it can only say that the tribunal doesn’t believe a word of the evidence he gave to its fifteen-year investigation.