Ireland - Where Wrongdoers Get a Free Pass
Bertie Ahern lied in public about his finances - but is still looked on with fondness by the public. What does this say about our attitudes towards wrongdoing?
Eamonn McCann, 27 Aug 2008
Spare a thought for Marion Jones as the athletics gets under way in Beijing. Chances are, she’ll be watching from jail at Fort Worth. That’s if they allow television in the cells.
Bertie Ahern, I suspect, is sniggering at her plight.
Just a couple of years back, Marion was the fastest woman in the world. She won three gold (100m, 200m, 4x400m) and two bronze (4x100m, long jump) medals at Sydney in 2000. At world championship level, she took 100m gold (1997, ‘99), 200m gold (2001), 4x100m gold (2001), 100m silver (2001) and long jump bronze (1999).
With her beauty, grace, charisma and sunny disposition, she enjoyed huge earnings from product endorsement.
But she admitted last October that she’d lied in denying to federal prosecutors that she’d taken banned steroids in 2001 and 2002. Without waiting for a ruling from the International Olympic Committee, she returned all her medals. Her records were expunged from the record books. In March, she began a six-month sentence for misleading the investigation.
Marion leaned over the courtroom railing and cried onto her husband’s shoulder as Judge Karas delivered sentence. Earlier, she had pleaded with him not to jail her and separate her from her two sons, one of whom she was still breast-feeding. “Your honour, I absolutely realise the gravity of these offences and I am deeply sorry... I ask you to be as merciful as a human being can be.” To no avail.
Karas said he couldn’t impose a fine, because she no longer had any money.
The Fine Gael TD Leo Varadkar made the point in the Dáil: Ahern lied not to a private investigator but in public and on oath to a High Court judge presiding over a tribunal set up by the parliament of which he was first minister. He persisted with a series of cock-and-bull stories, each more risible than the last, in efforts to explain the huge sums of money which had come into his possession while he was Minister for Finance, finally resorting to the last-ditch dodge of every caught-out con-man: “I won it on the horses.”
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