Soldier of Naivete

During his now extremely long tenure as leader of the Irish Republic's natural party of government, Fianna Fail, and as Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern has specialised in a studied naivete about the party's corrupt past and the ongoing tendency of its senior figures to get embroiled in extended investigations. But Bertie wants us to know that he's not completely naive, because he's gone on record today as saying that he always understood Gerry Adams to be a Provo:

The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has said he has always assumed that the Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams, had been a member of the IRA.

Mr Ahern said he was not concerned as to how close Mr Adams was to the IRA now.

Mr Ahern also said he did not know the present membership of the IRA army council, but that it was a question that was worth finding the answer to.

That's vintage Bertie in the last sentence -- it would be worth finding out who's on the Army Council now, but then again it would also be worth knowing the meaning of life and the latest sales figures for daughter Cecelia's chick-lit novel. Don't expect Bertie to put too much effort into that Army Council question with such other pressing issues on the table.

And Bertie's savviness about there being an Armalite on the Adams bedside table is in stark contrast to his oft-claimed ignorance about just why it was that senior Fianna Fail figures always seemed to be rolling in cash even with the economy, let alone the party's own treasury, in perpetually lean circumstances. Just this month, the Irish Times reported (subs. req'd) on a radio interview that Bertie had given the previous day:

Asked why he thought there had been such an extent of wrongdoing in the late 1980s, [Bertie] said: "The difficulty was that there were no rules. People just assumed that the highest of standards of probity and controls were in place and it got shoddy and people did wrong things."

He said he didn't suspect such activities were going on at the time. "In the ordinary run of things you get on with your work and you get on with things and you don't suspect that anyone is doing anything particularly wrong and you don't dwell on it...

Asked if he had ever suspected any of his colleagues of wrongdoing, he said: "Back in the 1980s the answer is No...I did not suspect there was anyone going around giving huge donations or involved in any kind of corruption. It's a pity any of these things happened.

So something about Gerry Adams (the Northern accent?) tipped off Bertie that there might be two sides to him, but Haughey's Dublin mansion, the private island, the trips to Paris; Liam Lawlor's delightfully Irish-named home (Somerton); the impeccably tailored Padraig Flynn, Ray Burke's trips to the Shelbourne with blank passports to meet visiting Saudis -- Bertie just had his head down, hard at work, serving the people of north Dublin and saw or heard nothing.

No wonder Dubya is visiting the Republic in June for a chat with Bertie, from whose ability to shut out the background noise and focus on what really matters he can truly learn something.