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FORMER TAOISEACH BERTIE Ahern has said he tried his “very best to do the right thing by the Irish people”, apologised for his mistakes but added that he got “a lot of things right”.
In his opening statement to the banking inquiry, Ahern said the last few years have been “extremely tough” on many families and added that it “breaks my heart”.
Ahern said he wished the recession had not happened but added that it was “disingenuous” to say all of the gains of the economic boom had been washed away.
Under questioning from Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty, Ahern admitted that parts of his opening statement had been taken word-for-word from his autobiography, saying his views have not changed.
The former Fianna Fáil leader told the Oireachtas committee: “With hindsight of course, I would have done things differently. I did make mistakes, I admit that but so does everyone who governs.
I know that during my time as Taoiseach, while I did not get everything right, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say I did try my very best to do the right thing by the Irish people. Of course, I apologise for my mistakes, but I am also pleased that I did get a lot of things right.
He paid tribute to his successor Brian Cowen and the late former finance minister Brian Lenihan and said he admired the efforts of the current government.
“I think the Taoiseach, Minister Noonan and Minister Howlin have shown a lot of commitment and courage in tackling the financial crisis,” he said.
“I think one of the lessons we should all take from this crisis is that maybe our politics needs to be less partisan and that as a small island, we should all pull together.”
The last few years have been extremely tough on many ordinary families and that breaks my heart, but the work of our democratic political system must prevail and the problems we faced on a massive scale of unemployment, emigration and the banking crisis, are on track to being resolved.
Ahern said he “definitely” believed that the fundamentals of the Irish economy were sound when he handed over to Brian Cowen in May 2008.
He said he was not aware of any proposals to guarantee Irish banks at that stage.
Ahern also defended the huge increase in public spending between 2000 and 2008. He pointed out that only Estonia’s expenditure as a percentage of GDP was lower than Ireland’s in 2006 and 2007.
He said he believed “we were safe enough” to increase public expenditure but, in hindsight, he said:
I probably would have battened down the hatches in 1997 and said no to everything and therefore we would have been like Germany with huge budget surpluses.
Ahern told the inquiry that it became apparent to him in 2009 that the tax reliefs on property that his government had introduced sustained the housing bubble.
He later said the economy’s reliance on taxes from residential property – some 25 per cent of revenue – was “ghastly”.
On his contact with developers, he said Fianna Fáil “endeavoured to have good contacts with as many sectors as we could” and insisted:
I don’t believe that personally I had much interaction with property developers.
On his decision to resign in 2008, he said this was primarily influenced by the events surrounding the Mahon Tribunal at the time, adding:
I would have stayed on. Not like some former leaders until they were 80, but I certainly would have stayed on for another 18 months.
The former Fianna Fáil leader served as finance minister in the 1990s and as taoiseach between 1997 and 2008.
We’ll be posting updates here. You can watch the proceedings on the livestream above or follow @TJ_Politics for live updates.
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somehow I don’t imagine what he has to say will amount to much.
No point even questioning the man Pauric, sure doesn’t the poor man have an awful case of amnesia
He doesn’t even have a bank account….
Bad cess to the cunning little snot.
Agreed Adrian,
He’ll talk forever and say nothing.
Have to say I really dislike his voice!!
One should never apologise for one’s past. Just deny everything.
How sorry is Bertie?…..sorry enough to hand back the pension that he has no right to?……Words cost nothing. Empty words cost even less. Charlie was right about Bertie being the most devious of them all….Like Crassus or Brutus..
Seriously how in the name of Jesus did the Irish electorate vote him in 3 times.?
We should all get a good slap !
@Shinner O Bot how many different accounts do you have????
I have many noms de guerre.
Oh dear double dropout Doherty has been linked to the FF builders tent. Pearce kept that quiet.
The absolute misery that man has caused to so many good people with his slippery Galway tent I’m alright jack politics.
what a waste of bloody time and money
Sadly if this ejit put himself for word again for election. .There would be diehard bertie followers vote for him.
@James no right to?37 years working in the Dail,7 days a week twenty hours a day and you think he had no right to it? tell the unions that one of their workers who has done the same and mucked up has no entitlement to a pension and you’ll find out very fast what their rights are
Dara “A worker ” has to wait until they are 66 years old , and soon to be increased to 68.years to get a Pension.
While your at it Dara let’s not forget all the jobs he got for his cronies on state boards and charities at the taxpayers expense, yes he served himself well.
his constituents voted him in
Jail !!
…i dont know Pauric…im sure he could ignite harper lees third book if he was given a chance.
The majority voted FF back in, in order to keep the celtic tiger show on the road, we all have blame here!!!
Bertie made coillte exempt from freedom of information act before he left office by a legal stroke.
Then he went work for a swiss cobsortium shortly after leaving office, who wanted to buy cpillte when the state assets were being auctioned off in the crash he helped cause . Naturally he was one of the few who knew the true value whuch he made secret.
This is all fact.
Bertie ahern is treasonous skum of the highest degree. Up there with hogan, kelly, bruton, kenny and others.
Filth.
If hindsight was forsight we wouldnt have voted him in
If bullshit was an aprhrodisiac then Bertie could have pole vaulted to Pluto (only a pity that he didnt)
Dara…..are you for real or just taking the piss?
@ James. Thats saying a lot coming from Charlie Haughey, as far as I’m concerned they can all rot in hell.
Crassus? Who he?
Cue the “my party is better than yours brigade”.
Our country has been brought to its knees in less than 100 years. It’s a disgrace. It’s disgusting that people died for us to have a country of our own and ye squabble over rubbish.
None of your parties are blameless.
Ye only add to the disgrace trying to win meaningless spats.
both civil war parties are a cancer on our society…
SHHHHH!!! It’s heresy around here to point out that the main 3 parties not only had the same economic policies but thee IDA bragged about this as a sign of stability.
You’d better get something sharp to defend yourself mate, around here it’s “my tribes better than your tribe because your tribe is stupid”
and if 2 tribes get together they will be twice as stupid …… if that is possible!
If FF had done the right thing, the things those of us called ‘doom and gloomers’ at the time wanted them to do, they’d have lost the 2007 election. Then FG /Lab would have got in, and they’d have spent spent spent from that temp property revenue and don’t tell me Noonan would have changed anything with the banks. This is man who gets advice from Goldman f____g Sachs (????????????????????????) who were at ground zero of the crash cooking Greeces books and selling off AAA rated toxic mortgage securities, a man who thinks the stock market doing well = economy doing well (a LC economics student would not make that mistake).
Even if a govt did it all right, we’d have had a recession, just not as big a clusterf–k as it was.
Any of you care to actually dispute that? You really think that if someone besides FF was in power none of it would have happened? That we’d be the only country in the western world that did not have a recession, just by the mere change of a particular party not being in office? I can see how you’d not want to actually argue that, it makes no sense
Yo Ryan. That is some serious accusation you have made there about Goldman Sachs. You clearly are in possession of information which needs directed at the relevant authorities instead of wasting your time with the lunatics on here.
If not – good luck with the slander & defamation case
Don’t comment on something that you have not got the most elementary knowledge of, it will only make you look like a tool. That stuff about Goldman is on the public record for years now, it’s undisputed. You also can’t sue someone for libel for something thats true.
As for the authorities lucky for Goldman they donated to the right election campaigns so they got away with their wanton fraud.
Now u r just trying to be too smart. if u were up in your law you would know that you can’t sue anyone for libel or slander. it is all called defamation of character nowadays
So what I said was correct, you cannot sue someone for libel. It’s not my job to educate him on recent combination of the two.
As he pulls a wad of fifties to dab his eyes!
‘Bertie: If hindsight was foresight, I’d be a billionaire .’
But failing that, I’ll settle for any old notes you want to throw me way. Just leave them over there in the cupboard along with the pension money and gifts and wins on the nags and all the other stuff i picked up along the way. I’ll make sure you’se are all well looked after
I wonder did he ever manage to get a bank account ?
He must get his pension cheques cashed down the bookies.
No memory, no bank account, no house at one point, no ethics or morals, St Bartholomew the corrupt proffering his dithering obfuscations once last time before riding off into the sunset , content, corpulent and comfortable.
@E: There’s another word beginning with C which would fit very suitably after comfortable!
It’ll be all lies, damed lies.
will Paddy the Plasterer make an appearance in this episode of the fairytale?
“Some of Bertie’s statement to the banking inquiry is taken directly from his book” – PS I Love you?
PS I screwed you.
Maybe he was really the wise one after all he never had a bank account to begin with….
He has to be most deluded man on the planet
Smart, cunning, predatory, devious, not deluded, you don’t become leader of an organization like FF if you are deluded.
One thing about Bertie is he’s very slick. It’s been a while since he was on, but there is a stark contrast between himself and cowen, indeed betweenthe other politicians in the room also!
The dog ate my homework
I’d say many in FF wish they’d done a policy u-turn after 2002. Imagine if they’d ring fenced 50% of that property tax revenue for a fiscal reserve fund like Singapore and spent the rest only on capital projects, instead of frittering it away on 10ers on welfare rates and allowances to buy elections, done some decent banking regulation. The public and opposition would revolted demanding more spending.
FG / Lab would have been in when the crash hit, the story would have been “bring back the days of good economic management” and they’d have sailed into office in 2011, FG-Lab outcasts for a generation.
The Bertie opening address must be designed to drive the audience to sleep.
Arsehole.
@Peter Slatter ……. he may be an arsehole but look at the two arseholes who followed him …….
True that. Wish Fianna Fail and Fine Gael would join forces seeing as they’re so similar. It’d make it easier to wipe them out. Labour are doing a good job of that themselves.
there were a lot more bertie supporters than 2…
He often makes me think of Tony Blair, one policy area brought hie entire legacy down.
In Blairs case it was Iraq that stole the shine off a 3 term premiership that was hugely popular. In Berties he had the GFA, huge social reforms like antidiscrimination laws, the disability act that totally changed the country for those with special needs, minimum wage, a totally transformed public transport system, massive expansion of the medical card system. People under 30 forget how diff this country was before that govt and we have to be shown the diff on reeling in the years. So all that good…then bad fiscal and banking policy ruined it all around 2002/2004
Why are they all in this Banking Inquiry allowed to read from scripts? Its beyond a joke at this point
Everyone gives an opening statement, should they choose to do so. Then they are questioned. Very standard for any Inquiry really.
He did roughly what anybody else would have done, go back and read the budget day debates and see what the opposition were calling for, ff fell somewhere in the middle
It is the illegal things that FF did that destroyed the country, the criminality at the heart of every FF Govt.
What illegal things did they do?
I too would be interested to know of these illegalities of which you speak.
Even with the Tribunal stuff, nothing was discovered that proved him guilty of anything and def nothing actionable by the DPP. Incidentally for those of you too young to remember, the Mahon Tribunal is what the opposition was ranting and raving about every day in the news in 2007, not warning of impending economic collapse or saying we overspent on that dodgy property revenue. We have to get real here and blame this on bad policy not just FF in particular, if we don’t we risk being blind when FG do some of the same things (and they already are) and we’ll sleep walk into a new crash
Got to give it to you ryan you shut baz up.
I’m not here to score points off people, I come here to inform and be informed. Some people seem to just turn up to have cheap slagging matches with someone not a member of their own political tribe, I prefer to be more constructive, learn something or help someone else learn something, the cheap jibes will be gone and forgotten about never to be read again in 24 hours, it’s pointless to engage in them. I just got so angry at his level of total ignorance.
Some rats will knowingly leave a ship months before it sinks.
People vote these halfwit brainless imbiciles in to run the country and then wonder why it all goes tits up. Get with the program people.
Doherty getting schooled in politics
He didn’t like it when it was mentioned about the company he worked in took part in get togethers in Listowel races….
They have done more harm to themselves and the inquiry than to Fianna Fáil
it’s getting awkward for him he’s starting to stutter and stammer.
That is only a trick, he never does it at meetings or under pressure.
It makes him seem all flustered and innocent.
correct John it’s an act he perfected he plays the oul ejit to a T.
He will be the Teflon( ex )Taoiseach. I would like to hear the truth!
Is Brian Cowen aware that he has passed away?
Don’t joke about that.
You’ll only get our hopes up.
I’d vote for him
Everything that is cancerous, treacherous and wrong in Fianna Fáil is present in that man.
While the average voter or member of them tens to be a traitorous piece of %$£”, he really was FF’s version of Superman.
The question that should be asked. Do you believe that you should be jailed?
This is a staged performance, they know what questions will be asked and the terms of reference are fairly questionable. We know all the actors and we know what will come out of this…….Mistakes were made…very sorry….blah blah. Biffo returns to his Dobbie job, bertie doing the horses and the rest of them wetting themselves laughing at us.
On the paranoid pills again joe?
Do you trust this charade ?
If you imagine people are “laughing at us” it is always a sign of paranoia and anxiety.
“Sure the world must be laughing at us eejits Ireland” etc
People who come out with that have problems they need to deal with, problems they never faced up to.
The world is carrying on doing its own thing, no one is laughing at us or you, move on with it.
On the behalf of all Irish people I’d like to extend our full forgiveness. You did you best and that is commendable. Onward and upwards.
They might as well play handball up against a haystack.
Think his parents made the biggest mistake by not using a condom
another traitor.
Definitely something funny in the water here thats keeping Irish people in zombified state i mean how the f*** did he get elected three times
Because the average Irish voter is a f***ing moron.
Aye, can’t wait until they show their true intelligence and fill the Dail with Sinn Fein, PBP, anti austerity alliance and the socialist party…we’d be in a much better position if we’d used the national pension fund to increase social welfare payments
Bertie sneaky f***** hows the daughter that just happened to get a big book deal and the son in law bullshitting on the radio every day and your own speaking engagements aroubd the world and sure your pension is going up again. LOL God sure its a grand life altogether
He had enough foresight to get the pension of a millionaire.
Lets vote him back in and let him topple the country again, for the craic. We can turn on the international social welfare system we had as well, where you can fly in once a month and claim it and go home again!!! OR just claim it for every child you have back at home!!, Sure what could go wrong!!?
Ahern your a toe rag!!!
Bertie is like a muppet version of the emperor Nero except that he didn’t play the fiddle as well as Nero; until it came to making his own tax returns. Remember his tax amnesty in the early 90′s or was that his two times tax amnesia, anyone? This Leper can’t change his spots, I think?
No Bertie, you wouldn’t be a billionaire cause we’d have foresight also and would never deal with a person like you. So in fact Bertie you wouldn’t have a pot to piss in.
If hindsight was foresight, maybe Bertie would actually have won it on a horse.
And if there was such a thing as Karma, you’d be in prison.
For anything in particular Liam or just because you think so?
For someone to go to jail in Ireland, they usually have to have been caught doing something illegal.
Perhaps you believe that anyone that you disagree with should be sent to a prison or maybe a concentration camp?
There are many countries that do that to their citizens, maybe you should look them up and see if you’d like to live somewhere like that.
So in excess of 25% of the tax take was coming from the property sector but the fundementals of the economy were sound. Right so.
In my mind’s eye, once Lehman Brothers went bankrupt I knew there would be waves from that. all the way to Ireland! There was no one on Lifeguard Duty, No Plan, Nothing! That is how the FF government let us down, the buck stops with them! Bertie has told the truth about the fact , that by introducing tax relief, in 2009, it helped create the housing bubble, it was abused by developers, and the banks just gave and gave.
And had it been the people who were in opposition(who were shouting for more spending) where would we be? the Irish people have let themselves down by indulging in the greed that came with the boom…we didn’t call stop, we called for more spending, further tax cuts..
Orla it was 1999 really that it all went wrong when Bill Clinton signed a deregulation bill for the worlds biggest banks, a bill that had protected the US system, thus the world, from banking crashes for 50 years and had worked great.
In Ireland we had two things thumping us, the property boom (and using money from that boom that was temporary money on long term items) and the banking crash. The banking crash, we did light regulation here too. Property…you know the mistakes. But all the main political parties were calling for even more drunken overheating of the economy nobody was yelling calm down but a few lonely economists, I remember very vividly, cos I was drinking the cool aid at the time, and when I started to listen to one of those economists people called me a ”doom n gloomer” . Now everyone and their mother claims they saw it coming they they didn’t, in 2007 the theme was ‘weve fixed the economy, the debate is how to spend the dosh’, and ‘we might slow down a tad and not BOOM quite so much but we’ll be ok’. The IMF…THE I-M-F..was predicting 4% growth in 2009
The rest of us say :
“If hindsight were foresight Bertie and his gang of w**kers would never have been elected”.
Bertie has got no hindsight or foresight – but that did not stop this crooked becoming a millionaire -
I hope the man with the crutch is waiting for him!
How can anyone try to justify running the economy without having a clue as to the solvency of its banks? Bertie, former minister of finance, did not know that the Irish banks were essentially bust under his watch? C’mon Bertie. That cra#p might have worked on the yes men when you were top dog. Not any longer. You were CEO. Acccept full responsibility and preserve some dignity.
Teflon Bertie
If Hindsight was Foresight, and both were names of registered race horses, he would probably have been involved in a billion making gambling venture….
But it’s not clear if he’d have a bank account where he could lodge the money.
Aw ffs….first there was the ignominy of the Bertie Bowl and now we’re treated to the Bertie Bawl…. plus ça change…
a right cunning fu**er
and if the rest of us had foresight you’d be in prison
That’s an awful lot of shoe boxes !
The man seemed to be a tireless worker throughout his career no matter the outcome. He deserves his pension as much as all the scroungers in the country.
Traitor of a nation, patriot my arse, hope he chokes on his pint in the pub that he thinks he is welcome, not
Spoken like the true Traitor
Breaks his heart? Where’s your s.o for the SVDP!
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