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. As Mahon puts it: “Much of the explanation provided by Mr Ahern as to the source of the substantial funds identified and inquired into in the course of the tribunal’s public hearings was deemed by the tribunal to be untrue.”
Much of this involved the provenance of hundreds of thousands of pounds donated to Ahern – supposedly by his friends – in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Remarkably, Ahern did not have a bank account between 1987 and 1993, a period including several years in which he served as the Minister for Finance.
Fianna Fail’s present leader, Micheal Martin, clearly wants to cut Bertie free, trusting that doing so will allow Fianna Fail to “move on”. Mistakes were made, you know, but what’s done is done and that was then but this is now and, sure, this is not your father’s Fianna Fail. Or, as he says:
The Fianna Fáil party I lead will not tolerate or fail to condemn abuse of public office – whether in our own party or, as both this report and the Moriarty Report have revealed, in others. I am determined to lead a party that will not permit any member to engage in behaviour that debases our primary duty which is to serve the people. […] I understand and share the anger and disappointment that many people will feel when reading the Tribunal’s report. I acknowledge that people have heard similar commitments from my party before, but my message to them is I understand the scale of the challenge we face rebuilding trust with people and there is nothing I take more seriously.
In other words, the Fianna Fail I lead will not be Fianna Fail.
Still, it is hard to disagree with the Irish Independent’s robust editorial today:
[I]t must be remembered that a great proportion of the tribunal’s longevity was due to the prolonged and determined efforts of powerful forces to delay and obstruct the inquiry and if possible to ensure its failure.
In the face of these and other difficulties, Mahon has prevailed, laying before the public a horrifying and detailed account of deep and systematic corruption directly involving hundreds if not thousands of participants and, indirectly, the entire nation.
Many who take only a casual, if any, interest in public affairs will be shocked.
Many more may think that the events disclosed here were already well known and either part of an accepted and tolerable pattern or isolated incidents. Nobody who reads this report with an open mind can come to any such gratifying conclusion.
Mahon describes wrongdoing on a scale usually associated only with “banana republics” or such notoriously corrupt European countries as Greece and Italy. The sad truth, with which we must now come to terms, is that Ireland is not just corrupt but corrupt at the heart of the political system and in many other aspects as well.
Inseparable from that truth is the role of the Fianna Fail party in Irish life. In its early years, that party prided itself on its severely puritanical approach. But no organisation can hold for so long such a dominant position in the life of a country without yielding to a variety of temptations. That first made itself apparent, in the case of Fianna Fail, under the premiership of Charles J Haughey.
Afterwards, it became so spectacular and so brazen that only the most innocent could ignore it.
Alas, there were many innocents. In a sane world this might be the end of Fianna Fail. But it is a slippery, resilient Hydra whose demise cannot be taken for granted. In Irish politics, innocence can always be regained.
Comments