BERTIE AHERN TO ADOPT MAFIA “MENTALLY INCOMPETENT” DEFENCE

The Irish Independent revealed today that the Taoiseach will tell the Mahon tribunal that he converted his salary cheques into sterling, and then back into punts, before lodging them into the three accounts he kept at the Permanent TSB branch in Drumcondra. This is in response to Grainne Carruth’s devastating evidence to the Mahon Tribunal on 20 March that she deposited £15,500 of sterling into the Taoiseach’s account.

An outline of Mr Ahern’s planned new strategy was provided yesterday by a highly-placed source. But he declined to specify why the Taoiseach would convert Irish cheques into sterling, then reconvert them to Irish pounds and lodge them, after paying foreign exchange charges and commissions on each transaction.

“There are perfectly legitimate reasons why things happened the way they did,” the source insisted.

The move is reminiscent of mafia crime boss Vincent ‘the chin’ Gigante, also known as ‘The Oddfather’ of New York. For years Gigante feigned mental incompetence in an attempt to avoid prosecution. “He became a familiar sight [in New York], wandering around the streets of Greenwich Village, a shabby, demented old man. Dressed in striped pyjamas, slippers and a royal blue robe, grinning and talking to himself and looking like an injured old bird. “God is my lawyer,” he told a psychiatrist. “He will defend me.”*

The Taoiseach has played the eccentric defense card before, with some success. In December 2007 he was asked at the Mahon Tribunal why he did not have a bank account between 1987 and 1993. He replied that he “wanted to do it that way.”

There is nothing in the law or the Constitution that you should . . . Some people put yellow in their hair, some people wear rings in their nose . . . I decided to cash my cheques, full stop.”

The latest move is part of that same defense plan - to treat the Taoiseach as an eccentric, given to bouts of mentally incompetent behaviour. The Taoiseach knows that the Mahon tribunal did not accept it, but he’s not worried about that. He knows that once the public accept it, he’ll survive.

The Taoiseach also knows that his coalition partners, the Greens and the PDs, will accept his ‘Oddfather’ defense without dissent.

It’s a high risk strategy, because it’s one thing to be the mentally incompetent ‘Oddfather’ who lives down the street, another to be the mentally incompetent ‘Oddfather’ who’s in charge of a country in an economic downturn.

The Taoiseach is due to return to the Tribunal in May.