Who’s the Turkey Then?

Ireland Calling with John Spain

Who’s the Turkey Then?

February 28, 2008

By John Spain

AT times here last week it was hard to know who was the turkey, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern or the glove puppet chosen as the Irish entry for the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Ahern was back before the Mahon Tribunal again last week facing more embarrassing revelations about his personal finances.

And in our national song contest final live on national network RTE, Dustin the Turkey was chosen by popular vote to represent Ireland in the Eurovision contest in Belgrade later this year, which has to be the most embarrassing thing to happen to us in some time.

First the turkey with the feathers. There are those who say that the Dustin victory — the turkey was chosen from among half a dozen real singers and songs in a national phone-in vote — is an indication of how sophisticated we have become.

It’s the ultimate ironical joke, they say, a recognition that the Eurovision itself has become a joke with awful East European versions of the Village People dominating the contest in recent years. (The expansion of the contest across the far reaches of Europe has turned what was once a harmless contest of forgettable pop songs into one in which slightly sleazy stage shows front unbelievably naff numbers.)

Ireland, which has won the contest so often in the past, has been doing badly in recent years and last year managed to come last. So there was some hope that the selection of our singer and song this year, from a shortlist picked by a professional team in RTE, would be more attuned to what was needed now to do well in the new Europe.

But no one expected us to go this far. Dustin was entered, it appears, as a way of injecting some life into the flagging national competition to find our Eurovision entry. No one seemed to think he could possibly win.

Looking back now, that was stupid because the turkey is a national hero for the way he sends up Irish politicians and personalities, and he was now giving the same treatment to the much derided Eurovision with his parody song titled “Irelande Douze Points.”

On last week’s live TV show before the national vote, the puppet performed the rap song from behind a blinged-up desk surrounded by glittery dancers and backing singers who camped it up East European style. It was the ultimate two fingers to what the Eurovision has become.

All of which was a great laugh. But from the time that Dustin was entered for the competition there was only going to be one winner, given his enormous popularity across the country and the fact that most people here now loathe the Eurovision.

And now we’re stuck with him. Leaving aside the fact that at least two of the other songs and singers which did not win were pretty good, the problem is that the rest of Europe may not get the joke.

It is even possible they will take it seriously. The parody may be lost in translation. Our only hope is that when the semi-finals take place in Serbia in May, Dustin will get knocked out before he humiliates us in front of 250 million people.

There are probably quite a few people in Fianna Fail now who wish that last week’s other turkey, Ahern, could be knocked out as well. Just when we thought that there could be no more twists in the tangled tale of his personal finances, even more revelations emerged last week at the tribunal of inquiry into possible political corruption.

This time the twist was a house in Ahern’s area on Dublin’s north side which was bought in 1993 by Celia Larkin, Ahern’s then partner, partly using money from his political organization fund. It was yet another example of the personal and political being mixed up in Ahern’s finances.

The money involved was £30,000 which was given as a “loan” to Larkin and, as so often seems to be the case where Ahern’s finances are concerned, there was a sad story to explain why it had happened.

Larkin had two elderly aunts who had lived in the rented house for many years and their landlady had died, so the house was going to be sold. To avoid the aunts being forced to move, Larkin bought the house with the “loan,” a loan that she did not pay back until a few weeks ago, presumably when she and Ahern realized it would emerge at the tribunal.

The story about the aunts is true, and the purchase of the house does seem to have been a genuine move to help the elderly ladies. But it does not look good, because it was money that was supposed to be used for political purposes in Ahern’s constituency. As I said, it’s yet another example of Ahern’s personal and political finances getting mixed up.

And there was more. The tribunal wanted to know about another unexplained lodgment of £5,000 into one of Ahern’s bank accounts in 1994 which he says may have been inheritance money he got from his brother following the death of his father. But he can’t be sure because he does not remember and does not have records of it.

His parents, who are supposed to have gifted him round-sum amounts, are both deceased. Surely the tribunal did not expect him to go into his mother and father’s finances, he said with understandable indignation when he was giving evidence last week.

All of which led to a blazing row at the end of last week between Ahern’s lawyer and the tribunal chairman over what the lawyer claimed was a witch-hunt by the Tribunal. The lawyer claimed the tribunal is going into Ahern’s private life and into matters that were personal and have nothing whatsoever to do with the unsubstantiated claim that a developer gave money to Ahern to get planning permission for a shopping center, which is what the tribunal is supposed to be investigating.

To many impartial observers the tribunal is way off track. The personally intrusive nature of the tribunal’s questioning is hard to stomach, not least because it is demeaning to the serving leader of the country. Among most Fianna Fail supporters it has caused outrage.

The dispute intensified at the weekend when it was learned that one of Larkin’s aunts, now a very old woman, had moved out of the house to avoid photographers.

The reason given by the tribunal — that they must go through all of Ahern’s accounts to be certain that no improper payments were made — looks more dubious as time goes on. They are not following a line.

What they are doing is a trawl through years and years of Ahern’s finances in the hope that something incriminating will turn up. And to defend himself Ahern is expected to remember every detail of his personal finances 14 or 15 years ago.

He has two problems. The first is the same problem that anyone would have trying to remember what various amounts of money were for or where they came from after a gap of more than 10 years.

When I look through my bank statement for the last three months I can’t figure half of it out, and even if I could find bank statements for 10 years ago they would mean very little to me. That’s normal, unless you’re one of those nerdy types with perfect records of everything since getting First Communion money.

For Ahern it’s even more difficult because he dealt in cash for some time after his marital separation, he then had several bank and building society accounts, and he also had political accounts for donated money coming in for his political bills.

He was a workaholic (or maybe a pol-aholic) because he spent all his time doing political work, particularly after his separation when politics seemed to take over his life. The result was his finances were a mess.

He also was the first politician here to have a full scale local political machine, with a full time office and permanent staff to maximize his vote in his area. This kind of operation is now standard (and now partly paid for by state funding) but he was the first to do it and he organized the funding of it himself.

And all that would have been fine if Ahern had been more careful with money. But as we all know by now, he wasn’t.

He was minister for finance at that stage and a taoiseach in waiting, so there was money being thrown at him from all quarters “to help with the work.” Some of it even arrived in a suitcase, which does not look good.

There are several amounts that went in and out of his accounts that do not look good either. And the compulsion to deal in cash a lot of the time certainly does not look good.

Most people here by now have concluded that he was taking donations when it would have been wiser to say no, and he was less than perfect at keeping his political funds separate from his personal money.

But we need to keep two things in mind. First, the amounts involved were chicken feed, adding up in today’s money to what my dentist makes in a few months. And secondly, there is no proof whatsoever that he was corrupt, that he ever did anyone any favors in return.

As I have said in this column before, all you have to do to judge whether Ahern was corrupt is look at his lifestyle over the past 20 years and at his lifestyle today. I live in a bigger house than he does. And the lawyers at the tribunal all live in houses that are mansions in comparison with Ahern’s humble abode.

That said, the death by a thousand cuts he is suffering at the hands of the tribunal now seems irreversible. His appearance at the tribunal last week — his third in six months — raised more questions than it answered.

And there’s more of it to come. No wonder a lot of people in Fianna Fail are wishing he would retire sooner rather than later.

But it’s not over yet. Ahern may be plump, he may be getting a roasting and he may even have been carved up a bit this week.

But there’s really only one turkey here and it’s name is Dustin, not Bertie.

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