from the heelers emails

Heelz.
You defended Bertie Aherne didn't you?
Avid Fan.


Heelers to Avid.
Ah Avid.
God will punish you.
If he ever finds out who you are.
I hope he gives you a good root in the bawls as well.
You're quite right.
I have spoken in defence of Bertie Aherne during his testimony to a tribunal investigating impropriety in Irish public life.
I averred that it was improper to even question him on the matters being investigated.
My own mother thought I was mad.
It must be stressed that in the past I had been particularly virulent in my criticisms of Fianna Fail.
Twenty years ago I ceased these criticisms in order to focus on dealing with my own mental problems.
On the eve of withdrawing from public life, I made my last open assessment of Fianna Fail in response to an assertion from my cousin Frances that all political parties are the same.
I told her: "There are certain similarities between Ireland's main political parties. I could never ask anyone to vote Fine Gael or Labour because like Fianna Fail they are all abortionist parties. But I want to say this. And I want you to remember me saying it. I believe that Fianna Fail is a deeply diseased organisation, corrupt and corrupting. It is my profoundest conviction that they will not only be themselves corrupt in the exercise of power, but that they will corrupt all around them, they will corrupt everything they touch, and in the end they will corrupt the nation. They will destroy us all."
Fast forward to the tribunal.
During the tribunal of enquiry I wrote off all my criticisms of Bertie Aherne because in my view Bertie Aherne had become a key figure in delivering peace in Northern Ireland.
Peace in Northern Ireland is the greatest single political achievement in the last 800 years of Irish history.
For this I had written off all my other concerns about Bertie Aherne's behaviour.
My thinking was: You don't throw away your Churchill on embezzlement charges during World War Two.
More explicitly, I believed that the Peace in Northern Ireland could still be lost and that in fact the whole process hinged on a handful of people whom I couldn't abide, to wit, the former protestant bigot Ian Paisley, the congenitally mild milk and water socialist Tony Blair, (whom I late admired for his stand in the War On Terror), the repenting terrorist murderers Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, and finally and just as importantly, on the embezzler Bertram Q Aherne.
Only these people, in my opinion, could deliver the respective sections of their own communities that we needed to make the Peace Process work.
Also, even while I was predicting economic apocolypse for Ireland, I never really considered Bertie Aherne responsible for wrecking the Irish economy.
He was a socialist and displayed all the decency and generosity of believing socialists, concern for the poor, an aspiration to protect the vulnerable, etc etc, along with all the profligate incompetencies and moral contradictions that seem to doom socialists to failure in the running of any economy they're let near.
I'd hazard that socialism tends to flounder on irreligion and on the excesses of the state sector trade unions.
Who knows.
Sometimes I'm right about things.
Nonetheless.
I still insist.
Aherne did not wreck Ireland.
My view is that Ireland was bankrupted overnight by his successors, namely the corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail Prime Minister Brian Cowan and the corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan who looted the treasury and borrowed the next fifty generations of Irish people into unrepayable debt and, merely to bail out a corrupt Fianna Fail gangster bank styling itself Anglo Irish, which was not even in the top three banks in the country and could easily have been let collapse into its own corrupt destruction.
Cowan and Lenihand in one day, with one masterstroke of corruption, spent Ireland into the Third World.
His extortionate awarding of pay claims to the teachers, nurses, lawyers, Judges, uncivil servants, thug cops, indolent soldiery, and fellow politicians, didn't help balance the books.
The teachers, nurses, cops et al (particularly Al, I hate him) are an ongoing cause of the catastrophe engulfing our country.
They are not the root cause.
The root cause is the arrant high octane gangsterism of Brian Cowan and Brian Lenihan.
Lenihan has escaped justice by dying of cancer.
He was unlikely to face any charges anyway since the corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail party has long ago colonised the Judiciary.
Lenihan's wife Patricia Ryan is a Circuit Court Judge.
So that's it folks.
I can only speak for myself on these matters.
And I may be wrong.
But as a citizen I personally have no charges against Bertie Aherne.
He is a great man.
I feel I owe him.