Gettin' jiggy with Dirty Bertie

Haven’t posted anything on this blog for a while, I’m thinking that if my blog was as popular as as bloggorah or slugger o toole then rumours would be abounding around the internet that I was dead.

Well, I’m not, and like Lisa Simpson, neither is my sense of moral indignation.

In case you are wondering where I was, I was in Africa. People were telling me that I should set up a travel blog, but I did like our ancestors used to do before the new-fangled days of web 2.0 and sent emails.

In one of them I was telling people that when I crossed the border from Kenya to Uganda I was asked for $30 but was given it back when I found out that I was Irish.

That was because Uganda is one of our biggest recipients of foreign aid. Bertie Ahern has visited the country, and afterwards had the brass balls to accuse the Fine Gael/Labour coalition of the eighties as leading a third world country, to which we would return in “jig time” if the opposition were re-elected. It’s a disgusting thing for someone who’s been to the real third world to have said, though no doubt he’s said the opposite on record since.

Since I came back, I found out that Ireland had suspended direct aid to Uganda as their president, Yoweri Museveni , wasn’t quite the “responsible” leader that Bill Clinton and others had made him out to be.

The sad thing from Africa’s point of view is that even after turning a blind eye to Tutsi attacks on Rwanda from Uganda, then getting together with the new Tutsi leadership in Rwanda to invade Congo-Kinshasa, steal their gold and diamonds and then use it to buy stuff to sell back to the Congolese at a profit, changing the constitution so that he can run again and cutting down much of the country’s natural rainforest to grow palm oil plantations, he remains one of the better leaders on the continent.

But then, who are we to judge?

In the past our great leader has been called the Teflon taioseach as dirt never stuck to him. I’m beginning to think that this reflects better on the dirt than it does on Bert.

It’s surprised me how little attention the revelations Sunday’s Turbine about Bertie’s father being a suspected cop-killer have received. There are those who argue that what happened in the past doesn’t have any bearing on current events, which is why the 90^th anniversary of 1916 passed without a murmur last year. It’s not as leaders are elected on the basis of who their fathers are, just ask Liam Cosgrave or George W Bush.

But there’s something deeply sinister about the fact the Bertie used his exclusive privilege to prevent the report on the death of Garda Fallon from being published. If he was too old to have anything to do with it, as Bertie insists, then what has he to hide?

In any case, isn’t it a tiny bit scary that his father was one of the Usual Suspects any time a cop was killed in this country? And it’s not like this is the only stain on his record. The rumours that Bertie’s first wife/partner left him haven’t gone away, they just aren’t being published because the media in this country is still so fucking supine.

In the eighties an extramarital affair by a TD was so widely reported in the UK that it gave a new term “horizontal jogging” to the English language, but it wasn’t even reported here.

It seems that while we may not be as deferent to the Church or the Gardai as we used to be, we’re still so insecure about our new-found wealth that we’re afraid to topple the person who takes all the credit for bringing it to us.

This doesn’t reflect well on us. After what happened in Virginia last week, our papers were full of stories about America’s gun culture and moral malaise. Yet there’s every possibility that our own leader is a corrupt, wife-beating cop-killers son.

Another irony is that in Uganda there’s a free press… the book where I read of Museveni’s invasion of the Congo was actually published in Kampala, and that was only after about 20 years of democracy. At the same stage in Irish democracy we were still banning books like Ulysess and even in the sixties someone’s shop was burned down for selling the thoughts of Chairman Mao.

So maybe it’s the people of Uganda who should really decide if they want to keep making this Faustian bargain with us. Do they really want to keep accepting dirty money from a country led by such a reprobate? Or should they withhold tea and palm oil exports to us until we show that we can govern ourselves responsibly?