not bad for a guy who, as Morning Irealand helpfully recapped, says he isn’t a betting man…but now the sterling lodgements, Bertie Ahern told the Mahon Tribunal yesterday, were the result of long-forgotten winnings at the track in Britain. A nation slowly shakes its head.
It took a long time to get to this point, but there was an inevitability to it. When certain people find it difficult to explain to certain authorities how they came by their money - lack of documentary evidence, lack of witnesses, lack of memory, lack of credibility and such-like - there remains an age-old fall-back position.
“Where did you get your loot?”
“Won it on a horse, Guv.”
Yesterday, on Day 868 in Dublin Castle, Bertie finally fell back on De horse, eh, de fence.
We saw it coming and laughed. But in reality it was bloody sad.
Miriam’s riff, as anticipated by Bock the Robber:
What does Bertie Ahern have in common with every low-life drug-dealer, scam artist,con-man and crook when asked to account for his money?
He won it on a horse.
So at last we know. Bertie, why didn’t you tell us this all those months ago and we wouldn’t have given you such a hard time?
Oh Bertie, Bertie, what the fuck were you thinking? Why didn’t you just tell us and we’d have understood?
Poor old Gráinne Carruth would have been spared all the trauma of cross-examination, and I wouldn’t have been calling you a slithering fucking liar.
Oh dear God.
Gavin - who went to Dublin Castle to watch:
“To be blunt, Ahern’s story stunk of horse shit”
Dan Sullivan’s take:
“From the people who brought you Bert and Tim’s Bogus Finances, a new musical spectacular is to grace our screens as Bertie and a lucky, very lucky member of the equine family star in ‘My Effing Lovely Horse’. A story of a simple man, a few spare quid and a fantastical horse that can travel through time and perform miracles of financial wizardry.”
Can do; can do…that horse really can can do….
Not everybody sees the humour, however. Colm Keena found the public gallery’s laughter at the Pinocchio ex-Taoiseach “unpleasant“. You know what’s really unpleasant? The would-be paper of record’s squishiness on this. A small town paper with a scintilla of self-respect would have run Bertie out of town six years ago.
Photo by bettlebrox used under Creative Commons
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1 response so far ↓
1 Dan Sullivan // Jun 5, 2008 at 11:20 am
Richard, I understand the lovely beast in question is no longer in the racing business but instead went into the financial sector. They were a key player in the structuring of the various financial instruments that were used to package the sub prime lender debts. Apparently people thought it talked a lot of horse sense.
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