Max McGuinness on Bertie's Banana Republic.
Bertie Ahern's staggering attempt this week to subvert the Mahon Tribunal (not to mention common sense) is a stroke worthy of an African dictator.
The taoiseach's bizarre insistence that comments he made in the Dáil in 2006 are somehow off limits to those investigating his financial affairs contradicts the legislature's basic reason for existing.
Parliament provides a means by which all citizens of the state (not excluding lawyers!) can supervise the workings of government. His argument implies that parliamentary privilege makes the Dáil a sort of black hole and that nothing that is ever said there should have wider repercussions. By the same line of reasoning, if a TD admitted to committing fraud in the chamber, the Gardaí would be obliged to ignore the crime . It is true that the TD's statement to the Dáil would itself be inadmissible as evidence but this does not stop the Gardaí using the information it contains as the basis for an investigation. Once Gardaí had uncovered other evidence, they would naturally bring a prosecution against the deputy. Anything else would be unacceptable.
Bertie's waste of High Court time and grandstanding obstructionism is based on a spurious reading of Article 15.13 of Bunreacht na hEireann:
"The members of each House of the Oireachtas shall, except in case of treason as defined in this Constitution, felony or breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest in going to and returning from, and while within the precincts of, either House, and shall not, in respect of any utterance in either House, be amenable to any court or any authority other than the House itself."
This means that Bertie cannot be brought to court on the basis of anything he says in the Dáil. But the Tribunal does not want to question him about what he said in the Dáíl. They want to question him about the financial records held by Paddy Stronge whose existence he revealed to the Dáil in 2006 during a rare moment of clarity about how he managed his money when he was minister for finance. Now that counsel for the tribunal know of the existence of these financial records (as we all do), they are entitled to ask questions about them, and, possibly to request their presentation as evidence. Thanks to his latest piece of cute hoorism, the man in the cash-filled anorak has managed to buy himself another month -- the hearing was today scheduled for April 1st.
Until then, the Tribunal will just have to sit on their hands and Bertie can think up another wheeze to distract us from his funny money -- the Olympic Games for Dublin in 2016 anyone? Or how about an Irish manned mission to the Moon within ten years?
But once the Tribunal's lawyers do obtain the records held by Paddy Stronge, maybe they will find that this material holds the answer to the 45,000 dollar question. After all, you wouldn't go to the High Court just for the sake of a few old bank statements and if you had nothing to hide, would you?
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