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Tuesday February 1, 2011

In Which A Humble Hack Ponders Bertie One Last Time; And A Pious Atheist Reveals His Turmoil

Was Charley approaching Bertie for "a quick word" in this photo? (Photocall)

"I still think we didn't get a proper national infrastructural stadium, and I think unfortunately, when I see little countries like Qatar and Kuwait talking about their ten stadiums and we never succeeded in getting one national stadium, that's an achievement I tried hard to do but I didn't get."
- Bertie Ahern shows he has a firm grasp on what's important as the country goes down the tubes

"Self- conceit may lead to self-destruction."
- old Aesop could have told quite a few fables about Ahern

By Charley Brady

Bertie Ahern, Bertie bloody Ahern, the preening balloon head that he is; every damned time you think that you have laid him to rest, well, up he vomits from whatever cess-pool he lives on inside that weird head of his and he just gives you more information as to how his deluded mind works.

Did you see him the other night as he said his farewell to the Dail that he hasn't even bothered to attend too often or even ask a question of in the last couple of years?

Before he buggered off in his chauffer-driven Merc he had time for some last words of wisdom for us.

I almost swallowed my own tongue when I heard you coming out with that bilge in what should - if you had been a normal politician instead of a low-rent bought and paid for disgrace to the office you held -have been a normal statement:

"I would have loved if someone somewhere could have told me what was going on in the banks, but nobody ever did." Jeez, I thought you were going to burst into tears.

Nobody ever told you? Are you taking the mickey or what? Apart from the fact that you were in charge of the country didn't your Finance Minister of the time tell you a few home truths after he - Brian Cowen - came back from his love-in on the golf course with Seanie FitzPatrick and his Anglo Irish Bank mates?

Sorry. I keep forgetting: All of these monetary geniuses never discussed money even once.

Look, Ahern, when you go on the tear with a few like-minded people you talk about things that you have in common, right? If they're talking soccer then admittedly my eyes glaze over big time but the point is that you talk about what is going on in your sphere of interest.

Yet none of you, all with the same interests, ever talked about the financial crisis that was about to change everything?

So as far as I'm concerned it's a steaming pile of horse manure that I have bunging up my nostrils when I hear that you lot never ever discussed money.

It was always someone else's fault when it comes to you, wasn't it. Bertie? You remind me of Manuel in "Faulty Towers": I KNOW NOTHING!

Yeah, well you did know and you were as happy as a pig in s*** when you were booted out, leaving clueless Brian Clown to take over the very thankless job that you left him with.

If you had just disappeared into the sunset after that you might have been actually left alone. But no, you couldn't even do that, could you, you feckin' serpent: you had to come back and put the boot into him as well, making out that it was all his fault.

You didn't know what was going on? I bloody knew what was going on when I saw my pension ripped off me, when I saw the work that I did in travel dry up!

You didn't know what was going on? At that point you were still in charge and EVERYBODY knew what was going on.

Don't give me that old guff, you chancer. You knew.

You managed, just about, to hang on to credibility with SOME people - sheep - until the moment you were photographed hiding behind a baseball cap in the back seat of a car on the way to your daughter's wedding to a boy band member, simply because they had sold their story to a glossy magazine.

The leader of the self-proclaimed Soldiers of Destiny, the man of the people and Ireland's last socialist in his own eyes, skulking in the back of a car under a baseball cap so that only one magazine could get the "exclusive" photos; and even that couldn't make this god-awful chiseller ashamed.

I would think that greed runs in the family but for the fact that you're other daughter, Cecilia, the best-selling novelist has managed to always act with a certain decorum and indeed kept her own wedding as low key as she could. She must have got it from her mother because she sure as Hell's jacks are black at midnight didn't pick it up from you.

Was there ever a time that you didn't do something for money? You shamed us that day and you shamed us yesterday once again.

When your pathetic attempts to explain yourself outside the Dail - it came down to "It's not my fault" - were interrupted by the deliciously named Joan Collins, your smug retort left a bad taste in the mouths of even the few suck- ups that you had left in your corner. You dismissed her as if she was some kind of eejit. But she wasn't, was she? She spoke for all of us.

Gavin Jennings: "Bertie, this is going to be your last day in the Dail?"

Ahern: "Yeah, my last full day. I'm told by the whip I'll have to come in on Saturday night which will be an unusual thing, but after 34 years here, practically every day of my life, it is the end."

Jennings: "Will you miss it?

Ahern: "Kind of, it's not... [then there's an interruption, thank heavens] .

Joan Collins: "Are you not ashamed to be coming out here on the streets when people like ourselves are getting cuts in their wages and taxes and all that? You have no shame, going on television for that past two days mouthing out of yourself, shame on you."

Ahern, smug look at the lady: "Thank you."

Collins: "No, not 'thank you', I'm fed up. I'm working all week and I'm getting less money in my paycheck all the time. How dare you?"

Yes, well, how indeed?

Bertie - this thing that actually still aspires to be President-later said:

"Well, I have to say outside here [it's called Leinster House, Bertie, in case you've already forgotten], this happens every day because people come along to try and get themselves on TV and radio."

When I had composed myself, having reached for the sick bucket that I always keep handy when ever this grinning yoke appears, I thought that I just couldn't have heard him right. But I did.

The man who found nothing embarrassing about being filmed in a cupboard for the tabloid newspaper that he writes for actually has the cursed gall to say that some people will do anything to get on television. The man that the term "forgotten but not gone" might have been invented for truly thinks that he's a cut above a woman who was voicing legitimate views

Collins, who is in fact a councillor, later said that when she saw that smug look on his face she just had to barge in and say something. Yet this parasite had the cheek to dismiss her with a truly disgusting comment like that.

You certainly did learn at the feet of your ex-master, didn't you, Ahern.

Bertie Ahern: he'll be remembered as a sponge on this country and even though he has often painted himself as a Man of the People - how I hate that term - he is so far removed from us as to be on another planet entirely. I hope he stays there. 'Way out in Outer Space.

My old man, he was one of the good guys and he always tried to tell me that it was wrong to actually hate somebody. Sorry, Dad; wherever your atoms are floating around now I let you down because there are people that I hate with a vengeance and I'm damned well not ashamed of it.

I moved from distaste for Ahern into downright despising the man when he came out with that guff about how people who disagreed with his economic policies should go off and commit suicide. Yeah, I know I've mentioned this more than once but it's a touchy subject with me.

People like Ahern in their untouchable little bubbles may not see how a man (sorry, but it is usually men) can see no hope, can be staring into an abyss where the bills are mounting up and there's just no way out. I can understand why they do what they do.

Ahern and his overfed and over watered cronies are unable to see that and this is why I found his remark so contemptible.

Well, as far as I'm concerned the jury is still out on Micheal Martin who has taken over the leadership of the Fianna Failures. I'm not all that impressed by his humble apologies on the behalf of FF. After all, he was in there for that whole time.

As I predicted last week, Brian Lenihan's stab in the back approach to politics won him no friends and that is why he suffered the rightful kicking he got when he actually had the cojones to put himself forward as a leader of the party. It was never going to happen. Not after he let the mask slip, it wasn't.

A kicking? The guy was humiliated and I don't care how he dresses it up.

As for Martin, new leader of Destiny's Soldiers? Well, at least he looks the part and is highly unlikely to show us up on the world stage appearance-wise, for what that's worth.

Unlike his predecessors I doubt that he'll be boasting a la Bertie about how much he can drink while driving safely (yeah, right, ya eejit) or even a la Cowen who manages to get himself a dishonourable mention on the Jay Leno show by being half cut during an interview at half eight of a morning, as you do.

At least he looks normal and in the political world where we have people who look the absolute antithesis of human like Jackie Healy Rae and Michael Lowry holding the government to ransom just because of the circumstances they find themselves in, that can't be too much of a bad thing. By the way, what the hell did happen to Lowry: he looks increasingly like a dude that made a deal with the Devil and now finds that the Devil is coming to collect his dues.

And on that faintly religious note...

Any long time readers of this column know that of all the things that I sure as hell don't believe in, top of the list after politicians and those who DON'T think that Jessica Lange is the ultimate woman, then it has it has to be God. Deep down inside all of us we know that Jessica is Perfection Personified and if you don't believe that then you are possibly the same kind of people who believe, no matter how unreasonable the assumption is, that there is some kind of benign entity looking out for us. I tell you something, though: I'll never describe myself as an atheist again, not when I see the company that I'm putting myself with.

I'm talking here about the awful Martijn Leenheer who lives in County Leitrim. Martijn, you see, got his jockeys in a twist when he found out that his four-year-old son Finn had been attending prayer meetings at school along with his class buddies.

The distraught father (who I'm finding it fierce difficult not to just openly laugh at) said: "When he told me that he had been praying at school, I was shocked, angered, that they hadn't followed my expressed wishes. I'd filled out the enrolment form and said that I didn't want my son to be taught the Catholic religion.

"I don't have a religion and I don't believe it is right to teach a four-year-old religion. I haven't received an apology from the school [wonder why]. They said I was undermining the teachers' authority. They told me that it was a Catholic school. I was in utter shock." [my italics]

When the Dutchman who didn't seem to grasp that Ireland is a Catholic country was told by the school that in that case, i.e. since he was in effect being such an asshole either he or his wife would have to supervise the FOUR-YEAR-OLD during the prayers that this eejit wouldn't let the kid join in, he replied that this wouldn't be practical.

So far I'm with the school on this one.

He's now moved Finn to an Educate Together school in Sligo (yeah, me too: you live and learn) that is an uncomfortable 19 klicks from their home in Dromahair, where they live. Oh, yeah they also have 20-month-old daughter called Sienna who they are now refusing - in the future, presumably - to send to the local primary school.

"I didn't want Finn to be conforming to religion, I feel that at that age he is just too small to think about religion."

Now I of all people am well in favour of not believing in God; but can anyone out there tell me what is wrong with this picture? THE KID IS FOUR-YEARS-OLD.

When I was four years old I liked joining in with my classmates and singing an old hymn or two. Although we never thought of it in those terms it was kind of what they call today, BONDING. No bad thing if you're going to be stuck with these classmates for the next few years. So don't make a laughing stock of the poor kid, you jackass.

Also, aren't you doing exactly what we non-believers always accuse others of doing: ENFORCING your beliefs onto a mind that is only in the very, in Finn's case, very early stages of working things out for himself. He won't thank you for this in the long run, my friend.

I have never regretted a Sunday that my Dad had us done up in our "Mass Clothes" and off we went. There was a kind of comfort, a kind of peace in it. You were with your family and all was right with the world and your community. There's nothing at all wrong with that.

Later, if you choose to go a different way, well then you have an informed opinion.

Jane Donnelly who is the education policy officer with Atheist Ireland at this point had to put her two cents' worth in and before I even go any further can you actually believe that there is such a thing? What do these strange people do all day? Sit around and talk about how much they don't believe in God and how much someone doesn't believe much more than you don't believe?

Anyway, according to Jane the State's education policy is "in breach of our international obligations.... The opt out clause must be practical and it must suit the wishes of the parents. But our opt-out clause just sits there in the Education Act. There are no statutory guidelines with it."

You know something? I don't have the faintest idea what that means. Ah, what the hell, it's too confusing for my little brain.

However, I do think I see what's going on here. Mr. Leenheer is considering taking legal action against the school through the Equality Authority or the Children's Ombudsman for Children.

Ah, I'm like the woman hater Paul on the road to Damascus: it's all so clear to me now. He does believe in something.

Does anybody care to join the dots?

By the time this hits the street on Tuesday our 30th Dail will just be getting given its last rites. So I hope to see you all again next week.

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net

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