Bertie and the Klu-Klux Klan

Bertie and the Klu-Klux Clan.

When I was a lad I was occasionally bad. On one such occasion in my late teens myself and three pals decided to go to a Fancy dress party in skerries in North Dublin, not far from the former village of Lusk where we grew up. We decided to go as The Drifters; a band of male black 'do-wop' singers that were quite well known in the seventies. At the disco (that's what night clubs were called back then) there was to be a competition for the best costume. Winning was a certainty with our plans of black shoe-polish and raiding our parents wardrobes for the most ridiculous seventies outfits we could throw together. The following days we got great mileage out of showing each other the flares and technicolor ties we intended to wear on the night.

However the funny thing was not so much the idea of the Fancy dress, but the fact that three of us were lying!   Relative to the drug use and sexual license of today's more' progressive' society, we were rather innocent back then. Perhaps the most gentle and innocent of my friends was Marcus Hamilton, or Hammy as was his rather unimaginative sobriquet. Hammy was the only one of our group who was not aware that we were not going to the disco as The Drifters, instead we were planning to go as hooded members of the Klu-klux Clan.

Before the politically correct get their collective knickers in a twist, one must point out that this event took place in the eighties in a small village in North Dublin where racism was impossible (due to the lack of other 'races'),and where the appearance of a black man would have been greeted with the same amazement and enthusiasm as a Martian.

So there we were on that fateful evening in the sitting room with the lights turned off, pillow-cases over our heads waiting for poor Hammy to knock on the door, in his polished face and Drifters costume. One of the lads had a pair of toy hand cuffs, and with a couple of pieces of two by four nailed together as a cross, we were set to make the headlines of the local paper. Amidst the haze of our enthusiasm, and despite the hand-cuffs we failed to recognize that the plan was doomed to failure if Hammy decided not to play along.

I am sure only one man in Ireland can properly describe how Bertie Ahern felt when he read the Mahon report and found that his pals and prodigees were deleting his number from their phones, faster than he had deleted from his mind details of the various depositors to his various bank accounts. I would imagine when Bertie looked towards his old party for a bit of support he felt just like Hammy did, when he turned on the lights and came into our sitting room so many years ago.

However unlike Bertie who truculently deprived his clan at Fianna Fail of the relatively benign sanction of expelling him from the party. Hammy took it very well, he did not deprive us of our fun and decided to play along. He even put on the hand cuffs and accompanied us to Skerries. We never made it into the local paper and we didn’t win any prizes at the disco which unfortunately (but not unusually) descended into a bit of a melee, when the local lads wanted to kill us because we were attracting too much attention from several Skerries girls who found our efforts to be quite entertaining. From what I recall we ended up licking our wounds on the early bus home after being chased from the disco, by a group of clan hating thugs.

Perhaps one of the greatest things about being in politics in Ireland is that no matter what you do you will always be relatively forgiven, as long as you don't ever apologize or admit your guilt. If you do that.. your a goner, you will likely receive the worst imaginable sanction; disappear from the media glare and die in obscurity.

As a nation we Irish have endured; 600 years of an often tyrannical domination, ten years of a famine that halved our population, countless botched revolutions, a civil war, the more recent banking debacle, and the betrayal of the people in the vilest manner by our religious leaders.

The fact is,in politics and business you can be as bad as you like and we will always be able to say that in relative terms “it could have been worse” and “didn't they give the pensioners the free bus-pass” .

The credible time for Fianna Fail to expel Bertie was before the Mahon Report, yet throughout the Mahon-years the Party did not consider an internal investigation into Bertie's affairs, and instead focused its efforts (from the top down) on de-railing the tribunal.

The real question we should be asking is not the €300 million question of whether Bertie lied or has ever taken bribes? But rather why he believes wholeheartedly that the bribes were not bribes but merely 'gifts'. Perhaps we don't want to ask these kinds of questions because we begin to approach some uncomfortable home truths? Our politicians didn't know what to do with the borrowed Tiger money and neither did we.

Bertie made a yearly salary of €248k. Yet in the midst of his social circle of developers, bankers and corporate pals he was a relative pauper! During the boom what the spice girls sang of sex was (and remains) equally applicable to power.

“If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends”

If Bertie considered his wealth in relative terms, then relative to his millionaire pals he was certainly in the hay-penny place. Of course he took 'donations' and 'gifts' from his friends, he says as much himself, and in Bertie parlance he refers to them as 'dig outs'. In truth he had little choice if he was to fit in and be the same as his pals which, in fairness to Bertie, is exactly what most of us spend much of our income trying to accomplish.

During the Tiger we were happy with Bertie, with his philosophy (or the lack of it) so happy that he was elected for three consecutive terms. If Mahon had published its findings during the boom, the headlines in the papers could just have easily read “Not Guilty of Corruption”, rather than “Liar Liar”. Perhaps it is only the recession and the greed fueled collapse of our economy that encourages us to throw mud at Bertie and his cronies.

When the lights went on after our party we took off our hoods and we knew that we were just kids, pretending and trying to fit in. Hammy lives in Australia and we haven't spoken for years, but our friendship remains in tact.

Ireland still struggles to distinguish between reality and the fancy dress party that once defined our national philosophy. Bertie reminds us of two important points; firstly when the costumes come off, there is often very little of any substance underneath; and secondly that many of our closest friends have fled the naked truth and are nowhere to be found.

As yet there remains no new philosophy in politics and we struggle to return to the same economic growth that brought us into our present mess. Perhaps we should ditch the costumes, take counsel from the spice girls, and think about what we want in life.... “what we really really want?”