Bertie Ahern’s shocking doorstep detonation in Dublin Central was no accidental explosion. It was a precision exercise.
Operation Howaya Keepin’ was meticulously planned and executed.
But Paul Murphy of Solidarity-People Before Profit rumbled Fianna Fáil’s top-secret project and revealed all in the Dáil on Wednesday.
He disclosed to wide-eyed TDs how The Soldiers of Destiny callously planted one of their infamous Bertie Bombs in the epicentre of a busy byelection as part of an elaborate manoeuvre designed to take the heat off profiteering landlords, greedy property developers and themselves.
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Apparently, what happened is that Fianna Fáil’s notoriously invisible Intelligence Division installed Bertie outside a woman’s door in the Dublin Central constituency and rigged him to go off as soon as she emerged to talk.
This woman was a plant.
She was in on the caper, covertly recording the flashpoint incident of the campaign on her phone. She would then lash it up on social media after the dust settled.
That Bertie Bomb was most unpleasant, unlike former taoiseach Ahern, who was very pleasant when jauntily greeting and then whisperingly agreeing with the woman whose vote he was canvassing.
Deputy Murphy described some of the carnage to Taoiseach Micheál Martin during Leaders’ Questions.
“Your former leader and taoiseach Bertie Ahern has engaged in disgusting racism in Dublin Central, saying ‘we have too many immigrants’, saying ‘the ones I worry about are the Africans . . . we can’t be taking in people from the Congo and all these places’, saying he ‘worries about the next generation of Muslims’.”
The fact that it was The Bert himself blowing up like this on the hustings “makes it very blatant what the agenda is – scapegoat immigrants, divide ordinary people”, concluded Paul.
And why would he do that?
“So nobody blames Bertie Ahern, Fianna Fáil and the landlords and developers you’ve allowed to profit from the housing crisis.”
Micheál Martin has a lot on his plate these days. He’s getting it in the neck from all directions on all sorts of issues.
Still and all, bet he didn’t think his week would include being ambushed by his disgraced predecessor lunging from the depths of retirement to be caught on camera banging on about mass immigration, unwelcome African arrivals from places like the Congo and his worries about Muslims.
Then again, maybe he did. Maybe it’s all part of the gameplan.
Paul Murphy certainly thinks it is.
Deploying the Bertie Bomb was a premeditated move to distract the voters of Dublin Central from the terrible living conditions that many people housed in rented council accommodation are forced to endure.
He held up grim photographs to prove his point and said the Government should intervene to reverse recent rent hikes imposed on tenants living in substandard flats.
And in the midst of a byelection where these issues could be highlighted, the Bertie Bomb goes off, blowing the uncomfortable immigration debate into the political mainstream.
Pay no heed.
“All this is an act of mass distraction,” declared Murphy.
The Taoiseach dismissed the conspiracy theory.
Leaving aside the fact he does not approve of Bertie’s comments, they were part of a random conversation which subsequently ended up in the public domain.
“It was not, therefore, a distraction process by anybody here,” Micheál pointed out, because who could anticipate that happening?
He decisively distanced himself from the controversial remarks in the Dáil. He did likewise at an earlier event, but was reluctant to criticise his former leader when asked if the comments were unhelpful.
The Taoiseach played down the incident.
“Sorry . . . It’s an exchange,” he shrugged, looking a bit nonplussed. “It’s an exchange on the doorstep.”
Micheál was absolutely right, for that is what it was.
He is a wily and vastly experienced politician with a lot of general elections under his belt. Like Bertie, he knows how to canvass and how to behave on the doorstep.
It opens the question of whether the former taoiseach was telling the voter what he thought he wanted her to hear, safe in the knowledge he could confidently confide in winning detail that he agreed with her without anyone else ever having to know.
And it brings to mind the story we had last week about the canvasser for Aontú who called to Bertie’s Drumcondra home looking for a vote, only for the one-time Uachtaráin of Fianna Fáil to tell her he actually voted for the Aontú candidate in a recent general election and he thinks the party and its leader, Peadar Tóibín, is great.
Maybe he was speaking from the heart on both occasions.
Not where the Bertie Bomb is concerned.
Once the video went public, he ran from the seat of the blast as fast as he could.
As he told our political correspondent Jack Horgan-Jones: “I’ve no problem with people from the Congo or Africa or anywhere else. I’ve good friends around Drumcondra, there’s a lot of the clergy in from Africa.”
Micheál confirmed to the Dáil and Paul Murphy that Bertie had “resiled” from recorded remarks.
But they are out there now.
But back to Deputy Murphy, whose efforts to improve the lot of council tenants living in terrible conditions while their rent is increased were lost in his eagerness to hold up Bertie’s telling doorstep conversation as proof of Fianna Fáil’s collusion with the profiteering classes.
It also gave him a chance to obliquely run through the towering lowlights of Bertie Ahern’s political career.
The Taoiseach must have been thrilled to hear Bertie’s greatest hits played again, years after he thought he binned them.
Paul was in his element.
People from the Congo didn’t take payments from developers to blow up the property bubble and they were never found by a tribunal to be untruthful in explaining how €400,000 in today’s money passed through their bank accounts, he declared.
And Muslim children didn’t crash the economy and they never rolled out the red carpet for developers and vulture funds, sowing the seed of the current housing disaster.
“What people say when they don’t think they’re being recorded is actually more valuable than what they say when they do know they’re being recorded” he said, moving back to conspiracy territory.
Bertie detonating on a Dublin Central doorstep was a value-added event and Paul told the Taoiseach he can see that now.
“It suggests a dirty game used on doors by Fianna Fáil to divide and rule ordinary people, to have them not blaming the people you represent – the developers, the landlords, the people who get rich from the housing crisis.
Instead, it is better to blame the people from Congo or wherever else.”
For much of his long political career, Bertie Ahern was dogged by that quote from his mentor and uber master of the brown envelope, former taoiseach Charles Haughey who famously described him as “the most skilful, most devious, most cunning of them all”.
(Funny that, but the colour of the envelope was never an issue back in those freewheeling, pre-tribunal dig-out days.)
But not even he, never mind the machinations of Fianna Fáil’s invisible Intelligence Division, could mount “an act of mass distraction” as fanciful as Operation Howaya Keepin’ by planting a Bertie Bomb on some woman’s doorstep in an attempt to sway the course of a byelection.
And anyway, by the way things are looking, their campaign is bombing all by itself.
