Dick of the Year: Bertie Ahern
This is a nomination for Bright Green Dick of the Year by Peter Geoghegan. Voting will open tomorrow.
Bertie Ahern, former Irish Taoiseach.
Got $50,000 to spare and fancy a laugh? Well why not hire former Irish Taoiseach – and my nomination for Dick of the Year – Bertie Ahern to deliver the motivational talk that he’s been wooing the international speaking circuit with all year. Its snappy title: ‘The Celtic Tiger: Ireland Leads as Model for Change’.
Yes, for just 50 grand the man who facilitated a property bubble so over-inflated it made Tulip Mania look positively risk adverse will tell you how his ‘key strategic decision-making, consensus building and change management transformed Ireland’.
Ahern transformed Ireland alright – now its in the hands of the IMF, has 13% unemployment, literally hundreds of thousands of empty houses, savage cuts to social welfare and legions of happy bankers who Ahern’s cronies, Brians Cowen and Lenihan, ensured would never get burnt.
In 2010, Biffo might be the most obvious Dick of the Year – his continuous lies about the state of Ireland’s banks, the disastrous bank guarantee and prevarication over the IMF’s arrival are all deserving of some award – but really the buck stops with the man whose policies and dodgy practices allowed the mess to happen in the first place: Bertie Ahern. Without Ahern there would have been no calamitous Celtic Tiger. Simple As. The FF idiots holding the fort now were all promoted by Ahern.
Dubbed the Teflon Taoiseach while in power, for his ability to escape flak, Ahern out of office is unapologetic. Watch this ad he did for the Irish News of the World earlier this year, think about what his gombeen brand of neo-liberalism did to Ireland, and tell me he’s not the dick of this – and just about any other – year.
Don’t you mean John Gormley? The Nick Clegg of his generation and nation.