Some think that the "Teflon Taoiseach" has pulled off another master stroke and has confounded the opposition. And it's true that he didn't apologise for his actions in accepting money from business men so much as "regret" the upset that such actions subsequently caused. So he wasn't wrong to take money or that he was sorry for accepting it. As Fionnan Sheahan points out Ahern's "carefully crafted statement went as far as Mr Ahern felt he had to go to get him out of the woods. There was no major act of contrition or large helping of humble pie". Ahern believes he has demonstrated that he is not corrupt but does not mind pleading guilty to the lesser charge of cronyism. He has no problem appointing his some of his benefactors to state boards as they're his mates.
I've been hearing people all day saying "Bertie got away with it" and that the opposition couldn't lay a glove on him. Given the limitations of the format, the opposition did manage to raise some important questions that Ahern didn't answer. Furthermore he clearly believes that his carefully crafted speech, even though it contained the words "apology" and "error of judgement", is sufficient to ensure his continuity in office for a further few months. Terry Prone in this morning's Examiner makes the following point:
They could question, but not interrogate. Now, the reality is that every police force in the world and every good broadcast interviewer in the world succeeds because they interrogate, rather than merely question. Interrogation requires the capacity to stop the speaker mid-sentence and go “Whoa. What precisely is meant by that phrase?” The opposition couldn’t do that yesterday. Interrogation allows the interrogator to hop back and forth in the speaker’s story, so they lose the thread, if that story is fabricated. The opposition couldn’t do that yesterday. Instead, they could make a speech and stick a hanging basket of questions at the end of it.
And what about the watchdogs that refuse to bark? The PDs have probably limited their options for the next election campaign. They can't repeat the "single party government, no thanks" trick next time and will probably have significant tax cuts and more vigorous privatisation proposals in their manifesto as well as attacks on the Rainbow "slump coalition". Whether the party has a solidified social base in the electorate to pull this off is very much open to question.
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