Sure everyone’s at it, so it must be OK
Many of you will have heard about the difficulties our glorious leader, Bertie Ahern, is having at the moment. For those of you who haven’t, or don’t know who he is, Bertie Ahern is the head honcho of the Irish Government and leader of the governing party. Prime Minister you might say, though it has a different name here in the Emerald Isle. Anyway, he’s in a spot of bother over alleged (?) financial irregularities. Nothing to rival a previous incumbent, Charles Haughey, or Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, but the amounts appear to run into several hundred thousand at least.
The irregularities have come to light as part of the ongoing Tribunal of Inquiry into (primarily) planning corruption in Dublin. This Tribunal was, ironically, set up by ‘The Bert’ himself in 1997 when either he must have believed his unofficial nickname, ‘The Teflon Taoiseach’ or he never thought it would get as far as investigating him. Basically a lot of money has been discovered in Bertie’s pockets, safes, bank accounts and so on and our man is unable to give satisfactory explanations of where the money came from.
Bertie has, bit by bit, been telling us that the money came from a combination of his salary, gifts and loans from friends when he’s been a bit short, and political donations. His story seems to be full of holes; kind of surprising for an accountant. Google him, or the Mahon Tribunal, and you’ll find reams of information about it so I won’t go into the details. Suffice to say that it all looks pretty suspicious to me. And to the press. And to the Revenue Commissioners. In fact, no-one believes him. He will not last long, though he seems determined to prolong his own agony.
My point in writing about this is that even his most vocal friends, who also appear not to believe him, now seem to be trotting out the argument that it’s not just Bertie who is corrupt, but in fact everyone is corrupt and so why should we pick on our poor leader? It’s not right to single him out when any of us, in his position, would have done the same. It’s just so unfair that the press and opposition parties are hounding him, insisting that his affairs should be transparent, black and white.
So there you have it. We should not expect our most senior politician to be honest. It’s fine for him to be ‘on the take’ just like everyone else in this great little country.
I was brought up to believe that just because your friend puts his hand in the fire doesn’t mean you should too. Does this not equally apply to the cookie jar? If some fella robs a bank, should we all go out and rob one too?
What kind of lesson are we teaching the young (and not so young) if we adopt this kind of attitude? What hope is there for society and the rule of law? If this is how it will be then perhaps we should welcome global warming and the destruction of the human race!
