06.06.08
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 12:21 pm by Sarah
Miriam Lord truly excels today.
Recalling the Dobson interview…
” What a performance. He bared his soul to the people, and they showed him compassion and understanding in return. Worse fools us.
He took advantage, pure and simple.
And in the tribunal witness box, Bertie Ahern tried to insist yesterday that in the Dobson interview he had not tried to put across the idea that he had been on his uppers. (Because, as has been shown in the last two days, and in Ahern’s previous appearances, that was definitely not the case.) “I don’t think that was the impression I gave,” he told lawyer Des O’Neill.
“I made it clear to Mr Dobson that I wasn’t impoverished after my separation . . . but I equally made it clear that I didn’t own a home.” O’Neill took the view that his interview gave the impression “he had been in straitened financial circumstances”. Bertie didn’t know where he got that impression from.
“We’ve been through this before,” replied Bertie sulkily.
Deathly Des wondered if the former taoiseach, in that emotional interview, had been seeking to “create the impression” of “financial impecuniosity” in order to justify getting payments?
“I don’t think, I mean, I haven’t looked at this for a while,” mumbled Bertie.
And this after a morning of farcical evidence about him routinely carrying around a “float” of a few thousand pounds in his hip pocket when he went over on a trip to Manchester. Of how he didn’t think it “a significant” amount of money to be carting about on his person in the early 1990s.
How he, as minister for finance, was using his millionaire pal (deceased) in England as a bureau de change. How he was thinking of buying himself a pad in Salford – a two-bedroom house or “mewses” property – as an investment. How he changed £30,000 into sterling in one transaction, but didn’t do it himself and can’t remember who ran the financial errand for him. How he was betting on the horses in England and homeless in Ireland.
It’s ridiculous. And Bertie knows it.”
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04.13.08
Posted in International Politics at 10:07 pm by Sarah
oooooh he’s good today. Just one excerpt
“The North Korean part of our mind must continue to accept that Mr Ahern did not deal in sterling, that every penny that went into his Irish Permanent account came from his salary cheques. It must suppress the meaning of what Mr Ahern said when he was defending Grainne Carruth.
“She just didn’t remember something”, he said. Then, in last week’s Sunday Independent interview, he repeated that Ms Carruth “could not genuinely remember”.
What did she not remember? Obviously, she didn’t remember the st£15,500, even when the tribunal proved beyond doubt that she lodged it into Mr Ahern’s account. It wasn’t that she was deliberately misleading the tribunal about the sterling, Mr Ahern insists — she just forgot.
But, isn’t Mr Ahern therefore admitting that there was sterling to forget? And that the sterling came from him, to be deposited into his account? Isn’t this an admission that the story he’s told all along was so much hoo-ha?
Shut up, shut up, shut up. Disloyal thoughts must be ruthlessly extirpated. The Dear Leader must not be harangued by treacherous and fickle traitors from the lower classes. My Celtic North Korean self hereby denounces my disloyal and false beliefs.”
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04.12.08
Posted in International Politics at 10:40 am by Sarah
Jaysus, he fairly socks it to Denis in the IT today. Sub reqd but far too long to quote. One flaw: he does rather conveniently exclude the Payback issue. He should have addressed that. Other than that, not good for DOB.
Update: The more I think about it the more I realise how unfair this piece is. For starters, as I first mentioned, Dunphy casually omits the most audacious Indo editorial line: the war they waged against the Rainbow Coalition when John Bruton, despite an explicit threat from senior management at INM, refused to change government policy to suit O’Reilly’s other business interests (close down MMDS operators and enquire into how Denis managed to get one. There was something about planning permission for a mine too, but I forget the details. Suffice to say the list was long but Bruton didn’t buckle and paid the price).
Then he list allegations against O’Brien like
“He doesn’t like hacks to be out of control.”
When? Who?
or derogatory lines like
RICH BOYS LIKE Denis O’Brien aspire to media ownership. Doors open, people listen when you speak, gravitas is conferred way beyond the dreams of merchants.
What was O’Reilly only a rich boy who targeted INM 30 years ago? Has Dunphy just a prejudice against new money, as in 10 years old, instead of 30 or 40?
Then he talks about his own experiences at Newstalk. First he pumps himself up of course…
“Although, with a small team of gifted and committed young journalists, we increased audience share exponentially”
Did they? I heard they never got more than about 20,000 listeners, and certainly not many more than they did with David McWilliams. And though he complains that
“his people let me know when he wasn’t happy with, say, Robert Fisk, Eamonn McCann, or the various contributors to our business slot.”
He omits to mention that (as far as I heard anyway) his own salary, many multiples of what “his small and gifted team” were earning, was being paid for out of O’Brien’s own pocket, and not Newstalk’s meagre advertising revenue. This despite the fact that there were many many mornings I tuned in and Dunphy simply wasn’t there – he took plenty of weeks off which can’t have helped develop a loyal listenership.
The last straw he says was that :
“Newstalk executives lost patience with me over a dispute that may seem insignificant, though I don’t believe it is. The station being a financial basket case, a decision was taken to double the cost to listeners who texted our programme. Loving the interaction with our audience, regarding the texts as a resource, I was shocked to be confronted with the new deal just before I went on air.
Had any other merchant sought to double their costs, we would have gone after them. Now we were proposing to rip off listeners. I told our listeners what was going on and expressed disapproval.
All hell broke loose. “What do you think you’re doing?” the managers wailed when I came out of studio. “Journalism,” I replied. Inquiring later about this get-rich-quick scheme, I was informed about a new revenue stream that was badly needed to pay my wages. The new revenue stream would yield €13,000 a year. I laughed and prepared to pack my bags. All bar one of the outstanding young team of budding journalists left shortly after. O’Brien didn’t care.”
So the managers, not O’Brien were pissed off that he slagged off their new enterprise. And how did he know O’Brien didn’t care? Or if he did, maybe he was right not to, since despite Dunphy’s big salary he failed to deliver an audience and all that hassle with McWilliams was for nothing.
Finally he praises Tony once again saying
“INM is not perfect, there are always issues with the reporting of O’Reilly’s own business interests, and the bottom line is a corporate imperative. [ there's an understatement] But INM journalists are broadly [my emphasis] free, even as they sometimes savage each other. We need look no farther than Bertie Ahern’s recent travails as covered by the Sunday Independent for proof that INM is a broad media church that facilitates Eoghan Harris and Gene Kerrigan.
Well, Kerrigan is the SINDO anomaly while Eoghan is the one that got the job and INM put FF back in power. And now Waterford Wedgwood is asking the government to underwrite loans to keep them afloat. Let’s see how that goes before we praise Sir Tony’s independence from the Indo’s editorial position.
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01.31.08
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 1:23 pm by Sarah
I want to state that I am officially embarrassed I wrote this.
What a laugh he must’ve had reading that.
The Des Richarson evidence should be a great laugh.
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01.20.08
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 9:51 pm by Sarah
of incurring harangues with Crewser…
His Dead Mother?
He’s bringing his Dead Mother into it?
Wonder who leaked those documents?
Typical, I write a column saying he’s probably not corrupt and then the man is so desperate to come up with explanations for the source of money he drags his dead mother into it.
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12.03.07
Posted in International Politics at 2:02 pm by Sarah
Well the News at One was great fun. It kicked off with Bertie telling Charlie Bird that Des Richardson’s method of providing false invoices to NCB to collect the money (which, lets face it, was just money laundering) was wrong and that he didn’t know anything about it. Richardson went about collecting the money and Bertie just spent it.
Isn’t that very similar to Charlie Haughey’s defence? Des Traynor collected the money and sure Charlie didn’t know what was happening? Of course, Traynor was dead and Richardson is still very much alive and if he gets a sniff of being dumped on by Ahern perhaps he’ll have to something to say about it…
Then Senator Eoghan Harris came on to tell us the whole thing is being made up by the Daily Mail, the Tribunal should be shut down and Bertie Ahern is one of Ireland’s greatest Taoisigh!! Hurrah!
As I’ve said before. Fine! shut down the Tribunals, and let the Rev move in. They’d have great crack checking up on Richardson’s companies as well as Ahern’s.
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 10:38 am by Sarah
What could Albert Reynolds have been doing during that six-hour stopover in Freeport in March 1994? Nipping to the bank, or topping up his tan?
We heard about the trip last week through evidence at the Mahon tribunal from Air Corps chief Ralph James, the former pilot of the government jet. He knew the stop had been made, but didn’t know why.
Martin Mansergh, who accompanied Reynolds on the trip to the Bahamas, was quick to suggest that the brigadier’s evidence “must be based on faulty recollection”. Mansergh was too quick, though. Between hearing a report of James’ evidence on the RTE news at lunchtime on Wednesday, and issuing a statement in which he sought to undermine the pilot’s evidence, the Fianna Fail TD might have paused to check the transcripts. The Air Corps chief was not relying on his own recollection but on detailed records of the flight plan which do indeed show a last-minute stopover was made in Freeport at the personal request of the then taoiseach.
The only one with a faulty recollection then is Mansergh, who can remember with exquisite detail the military honours afforded Reynolds on the trip and a dinner party hosted by Tony O’Reilly. But he must have been distracted when the plane touched down in Freeport because the TD is not terribly sure what happened there.
Mansergh’s instinct to get his statement out fast last Wednesday is symptomatic of Fianna Fail’s attitude to the tribunals. In general the party’s defence strategy has three legs: nobody saw me do it; the witness is mad; this is all a waste of money anyway. If no-one saw them do it then maybe they didn’t do it. The problem is that, sometimes, someone did see them and they give evidence about the most extraordinary transactions. The tales are sometimes so incredible that Fianna Fail is able to spin that, sure, “poor X isn’t well”. Despite my own propensity to engage in conspiracy theories, even I shake my head sometimes and think half of the evidence must be invented.
It was Tom Gilmartin who first introduced the Bahamas trip to the tribunal. Gilmartin says that Owen O’Callaghan, a rival developer, once told him that he’d given Reynolds IR£150,000 in his Cork home at around 3am one night in March 1994. Reynolds supposedly said he was tired and had to be picked up by helicopter as he was leaving for America the next morning for St Patrick’s Day. Other sources told Gilmartin that Reynolds collected $1m in New York, Boston and Chicago, good-will money because of the peace process. But only $70,000 made it back to Fianna Fail and Gilmartin quipped that “$900,000 must have fallen off the plane and floated down towards the Cayman Islands”.
Preposterous, no? Reynolds stuffing a bag with cash in a back bedroom in Cork in the middle of the night? A million dollars collected from rich Irish-Americans beind stashed in a Caribbean bank? Gilmartin’s off his rocker, right? Then the brigadier shows up with the flight plan.
The records show that Reynolds was indeed collected by helicopter late at night in Cork after a fundraising dinner. He did go off America next day, and there was an unscheduled stopover in Freeport on the way home from an official visit to the Bahamas. If Gilmartin’s got that much right, perhaps he’s not barking after all? Meanwhile Padraic O’Connor, former head of NCB stockbrokers, also testified to the Mahon Tribunal last week and has directly contradicted the evidence of Bertie Ahern. The taoiseach claimed, in that weepy interview with RTE’s Brian Dobson, that O’Connor was one of the close and personal friends approached to give him a dig-out when he found himself in financial difficulty. O’Connor says he was “friendly” with Ahern during their professional dealings, but not his “friend”. A donation of IR£5,000 was made from NCB to Ahern’s constituency funds and was not intended for the taoiseach personally. Under rigorous cross-examination, O’Connor’s version has stood up in its entirety and seems far more credible than Ahern’s.
But so what? Is it worth spending millions to find this out? If Irish people have made one thing clear it’s that they don’t particularly care about politicians getting hand-outs from businessmen. Perhaps they think everyone’s doing it, or that it’s worth having a crooked politician in power if they do the rest of the job properly. So everyone from Beverly Flynn to Michael Lowry have been re-elected even after incontrovertible proof of past improprieties. If voters don’t care, then what’s the point in enriching lawyers by teasing out more financial shenanigans?
Well, firstly, our crooked politicians don’t represent everyone. For every poll-topper with a dodgy record, there are many more honest, decent TDs and councillors who are disgusted by bribery, tax evasion and corruption. Those people deserve the truth, even if everyone else isn’t interested.
The defence of those challenged with appalling truths about their country’s past is invariably to claim that they never knew. Magdalene Laundries? Industrial schools? Sexual abuse? No-one told us. Had we known, of course we would have done something. But people are skilled at knowing only what they want to know. Inconvenient truths, as Al Gore calls them, are easily ignored. The most important thing the tribunals do is strip away the lame defence of ignorance, and hold those inconvenient truths up for all to see. When details of Charlie Haughey’s finances were exposed his political colleagues had to line up one after another and claim, probably truthfully, that they had no idea. Another former taoiseach, John Bruton, was forced by the Mahon Tribunal to acknowledge that, yes, Frank Dunlop had indeed told him that a Fine Gael councillor, Tom Hand, was demanding bribes for zoning votes. Bruton admits he did nothing about it. I can certainly understand his reason for either discounting what Dunlop told him, or dithering instead of taking action. But now he can’t say he was never told, and that’s important.
I despise waste, but if we’re going to watch money flushed down the toilet on e-voting machines and make-up for Bertie Ahern, then a few hundred million on the truth is good value, relatively speaking.
Maybe Albert Reynolds wasn’t on the take, maybe Bertie Ahern really did save £50,000, maybe Tom Gilmartin’s evidence is more fiction that fact and it’s possible Frank Dunlop is gilding the lily. But let’s find out, and let there be no ambiguity about what we know and don’t know.
If intelligent men like Mansergh are happy to indulge themselves by defending their party and its leaders regardless of their actions, then let them. But don’t ever let them stand outside Leinster House and claim that they didn’t know, or that they were never told.
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11.28.07
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 2:12 pm by Sarah
Ok, this is just so funny. I turned back on the News At One hoping Bev was gone, to hear the report on proceedings at the Mahon Tribunal. So previously Tom Gilmartin gave evidence that rival developer Owen O’Callaghan told him he gave Mr Reynolds £150,000 in his house at around 3am after a dinner in Cork in March 1994. He said he was told Mr Reynolds was tired because he had to picked up by helicopter the next morning to be brought to the US for St Patrick’s Day. He was told by other sources that Mr Reynolds collected $1m in New York, Boston and Chicago that year following the Northern Ireland peace deal. But he was told only $70,000 made it to the party and that “$900,000 must have fallen off the plane and floated down towards the Cayman Islands”
Now when I heard that I thought, ah yeah, Gilmartin spinning ludricous tales again..
But TODAY! TODAY!
the pilot of the government jet gave evidence that
“Later that day Mr Reynolds, his wife and a number of civil servants were flown by Government jet to New York, the plane stopped over in Boston before picking up the party and flying them to Washington and Chicago.
On the return journey there was an unscheduled six-hour stop at Freetown* in the Bahamas at the request of Mr Reynolds. Mr James said no reason was recorded for the stop over.
I laughed out loud, which when you’re on your own in the kitchen is a weird thing to do.
I dunno, every time I soften up and assume there’s nothing in it, they drop something else on you. It’s bizarre.
Update: oh rats, Martin Mansergh, official apologist for three FF Taoisigh has spoiled all the fun by intervening with the facts. In a statement just issued
“Some of the evidence given to the Mahon Tribunal today by the distinguished Head of the Air Corps Brigadier General James (if accurately reported on the RTÉ lunchtime news) must be based on faulty recollection. Even a senior officer of the Air Corps would not necessarily always be aware of the detailed purposes of an official visit or discussions that took place during one.
I was a member of the Taoiseach’s delegation to the United States, as a Special Advisor on Northern Ireland. At the end of the visit on 19 March, which included functions in a number of cities as well as St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in Washington, the Taoiseach flew from Hartford, Connecticut to the Bahamas for the first official visit from Ireland, which was neither ‘informal’ nor ‘unscheduled’, and which lasted three days from Saturday till Monday inclusive.
He was greeted with full military honours, including a multi-gun army salute, by the Prime Minister of the Bahamas at the airport. Later that Saturday afternoon, officials from both Governments, including myself, sat down to explore a number of areas of cooperation. That evening, Tony O’Reilly, Chairman of Independent Newspapers, hosted a dinner for Albert Reynolds and his delegation, which was attended by half the cabinet of the Bahamas, at his home at Lyford Quay.
On Monday 21 March 1994, there were resumed talks chaired by Taoiseach and Prime Minister, and a number of visits made to small enterprises and to the principal harbour on another island in the Bahamas. The whole emphasis of the visit was on economic development and mutual cooperation. The visit was referred to in the press at the time. For example, an article in the Cork Examiner of 21 March 1994 by Liam O’Neill reported:
‘Taoiseach Albert Reynolds left the United States on Saturday for the Bahamas after a very successful seven-day visit, the highlight of which was a White House meeting with President Clinton on St. Patrick’s Day. He will spend three days in the Bahamas on an official visit before returning to Dublin on Tuesday. His last engagement in the United States was at the John F. Kennedy Trust dinner in Hartford, Connecticut, on Friday night.’ ”
Though you have to wonder, what mutual benefit is there in economic development in the Bahamas? and the cosiness of dinners with Tony. Let’s get a report on the matters that required co-operation. Of course, with that heavy schedule I’m SURE Albert had no time to nip to the bank…..Grumble grumble….
*yes, a misreport, that should’ve been Freeport.
Further update! HOLD PRESS – Apparently Manzer has been vague….Mr Reynolds was indeed met with full military honours but NOT in Freeport where the 6 hour stopover took place. So they went to Freeport, and took off again and landed somewhere else officially – perhaps Nassau, the capital???
Wonderful. Could be something in this yet.
MORE UPDATES! Nothing daunted – your intrepid investigative blogger phoned the office of the Deputy from Tipperary (south?) Fair dues, the man phoned back. My specific question was : did the plane touch down in Freeport first and then go on to Nassau for the official welcome? He was extremely charming and went into great detail but the bottom line – he couldn’t say specifically. They did go to different islands so there was some flying around but he couldn’t say precisely. He was also careful to say that he based his statement on the report he heard on the News at One – not on what the pilot’s actual evidence was. So, our bottom line? We need to see the Tribunal transcript and the flight plan. The pilot could still be absolutely correct. The plane may have been scheduled to go to Nassau but they diverted to Freeport first.
And finally! Yes, the 9pm confirms it…the scheduled flight was to Nassau but there was an unscheduled stop at Freeport….Great stuff. What WAS he doing there?
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10.07.07
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 5:08 pm by Sarah
EXCITABLE newspaper headlines continued to suggest until quite recently that the taoiseach’s political difficulties were deepening. He’d simply have to resign, it was suggested, because he had failed to explain credibly how up to €300,000 washed through his personal finances in the mid-1990s.
Throughout, Bertie Ahern stuck rigidly to the message he has delivered ever since this story first broke a year ago: “it was all because of my marital separation”.
On the face of it, Ahern’s claim that inordinate amounts of cash moved in and out his and Celia Larkin’s bank accounts due to his separation makes no sense whatsoever. Marital breakdown generally results not in riches but in impoverishment – to such an extent that many people stay in miserable marriages because they can’t afford to leave them. Let me be clear: I don’t know anyone who truly believes that Ahern took money from businessmen as bribes. All the Mahon tribunal has shown is that Ahern got his hands on considerable amounts of cash in 1994-95. One assumes that if they were able to link this money to Owen O’Callaghan, we’d have heard about it by now. So Ahern is most likely innocent of Tom Gilmartin’s charge that the source of his money was the Cork-based shopping centre magnate and the payments were linked to the construction of Liffey Valley shopping centre.
Nevertheless it is the function of the tribunal, which the taoiseach incorrectly claims credit for establishing, to investigate all apparently relevant claims made to it. Ahern, despite his complaints, has not been singled out. He is simply one of a series of people being investigated because others, from perjurist Frank Dunlop to possible fantasist Gilmartin, named names. What distinguishes Ahern is his difficulty in coming up with a credible explanation for the source of £50,000 here and what looks like $45,000 there. That he dealt so extensively in cash is an added embarrassment, given that he was then minister for finance and is a trained accountant.
So how to make sense of his story? Why would anyone eschew the regularity of a bank account and do business in cash? Well, people usually deal in cash in order to conceal their income, and for one of three reasons: corruption, tax evasion, or ex-wives who can only take half of what they know to exist.
I share the general disbelief that Ahern is guilty of corruption. The “dig-outs” he received were inappropriate for someone in high office, but don’t necessarily translate into bribery. The Revenue could be a bigger problem for Ahern. His admission that he got dig-outs which he tried but failed to repay has already prompted a phone call from tax officials and money has been paid “on account”. The onus may eventually be on Ahern to prove that he really managed to save £50,000 while on a ministerial salary. Anyone who has experienced an income-tax audit will wince at the forensic examination Ahern can expect when those boys come to visit. If he failed to declare income, the interest and penalties imposed could necessitate another dig-out.
But I’m not convinced tax evasion was his aim. Ahern is most likely telling the truth when he claims his irregular financial and property dealings in 1994-95 were the result of his separation.
The breakdown of a marriage sometimes provides a significant motivation to hide money. As the complex process of distributing joint assets gets underway, and the full impact of a financial settlement being made by one party on the other begins to bite, the incentive is there to disguise the extent of assets and savings. Since husbands are usually the ones who generated income in a marriage, they are required to write a cheque and it hurts.
So when Ahern says “anyone who has been through a similar situation will have some understanding of my position; going through a separation is a very complex and fraught ordeal”, he doesn’t mean that separated husbands are legally barred from opening bank accounts and must deal in cash. He knows that we know that what he really means is that he was hiding money from his wife.
His legal separation was concluded in 1993 and it is hardly a surprise to find large amount of cash popping up in 1994 and, for safety’s sake, being funnelled through Larkin’s account. Without this being spelled out for us, we understand that these irregular transactions are what is being referred to under the euphemism “marital separation”.
The advantage of so willingly offering “separation” as the excuse for extremely odd financial dealings is that Irish people, who readily accept pretty low standards in high office anyway, are absolutely clear on the relationship between private and political lives: none. Parnell is the last Irish politician required to resign over private difficulty. Since then we have cheerfully, and sometimes correctly, accepted that separations, extra-marital affairs, personal debt, encounters with prostitutes or rent boys, and imprisonment bear no reflection on the ability of an elected representative to do his job.
The only time a politician finds himself under pressure to resign is when there is a specific connection to the office. Once voters are clear that Ahern’s handling of briefcases full of cash was due to his quite understandable, if unethical, desire to hide income from his wife, there is no appetite to seek his removal from office. Particularly not within the male bastion that is Fianna Fail.
Forgiving this kind of behaviour does leave Irish politicians and voters open to the charge of tolerating hypocrisy. Indeed, hypocrisy is seen as not merely acceptable but probably necessary to the conduct of one’s life here. This may be due to the oppressive nature of our past society, where low official tolerance of marital difficulties meant an unofficial understanding evolved that good people experiencing hard times feel obliged to use what are strictly speaking unethical, irregular and occasionally illegal methods to cope. Those who fought on the losing side of the first campaign to introduce divorce are entitled to be bitter about Fianna Fail politicians who conducted second relationships while refusing to support others who wanted to regularise their position. But without a general revulsion of this kind of double-dealing, no one will call them to account for that.
Sure in this knowledge, Ahern’s plaintive “separation” tale of woe is effective. There will be no resignation and Brian Cowen may as well have the tanaiste’s office redecorated. He’ll be enjoying it for some time yet.
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10.04.07
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 9:08 pm by Sarah
in the IT today. This is hilarious.
From Grainne Lawlor in Thornton, Dublin (site of the proposed prison?)
Madam, – I would like to draw your readers’ attention to what I consider to be a serious lapse in standards by RTÉ, which has also been echoed in some press reportage.
I strongly object to the demeaning mimicry of the evidence of Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern in coverage of the tribunal. The manner in which an actor takes off Mr Ahern’s homely north Dublin accent and phraseology is in marked contrast to the upper-crust – almost “Home Counties” – tones of the learned counsel probing him for details of transactions that took place 14 years ago. The Salem-like mood generated by this style of reporting perhaps conceals a snobbish “better school, better address” contempt for a grassroots Dublin Taoiseach.
Hello? RTE is forced to reinact the Tribunal because it’s prohibited from broadcasting them. This has been taking place for 10 years to general acclaim. Bertie has a Dublin accent which is not only legitimate and authentic but has actually been to his advantage by establishing his “ordinary man” credentials. And she doesn’t think its fair that the actor imitates it????? And those meany barristers have posh accents?? It’s just not fair!!!!! It makes him sound bad!! Stoppit stoppit stoppit!
Maybe it sounds bad because HE sounds bad!!
The recreations have been a fantastic way for people to get a real sense of what’s going on. Personally I think they should be filmed or at least on radio, but they are not (which suits most of the witnesses, Albert Reynold for starters), so this is what we’ve got. And Grainne is outraged because the barrister sounds posh and Bertie sounds homely. What she obviously means is that Bertie sounds evasive, dodgy and utterly pathetic and it mustn’t be pleasant for his supporters to hear him thus demeaned. No handy soundbite comments on his way into or out of a function like most of his appearances on telly or radio.
Love, if you don’t like this accent, deal with it. And if you don’t like the barrister’s, well, what? Mandatory deep immersion in west Dublin?
She goes on:
“Looking back over Mr Ahern’s career – not least his massive contribution to industrial peace and unprecedented economic development and his tireless and successful work for a historic Northern settlement – should put things in a proper perspective.”
Gee, almost sounds like the Crewser!!! Know her, do you??
.
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