Ship of Fools Read Online Free PDF

insider intimacy in which cronyism thrived continued to hang over boomtime
Ireland. On their own, either political stupidity or a tolerance for sleaze would have threatened the sustainability of the Irish economic miracle. Together, they ensured its demise.
    Jonathan Swift, in leaving money in his will for the founding of a mental hospital in Dublin, noted that ‘no nation needed it so much’. The government adapted Swift’s satire to its own exercise in insanity:
    We used up all the wealth we had
To build a ship for fools and mad
And, knowing it proof against all shocks,
Steered it blithely towards the rocks.

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    A Patriot for Me
    â€˜Thanks very much and I’ll sort you out’
    - Bertie Ahern to donor Barry English
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    For once in his political life, Bertie Ahern was entirely unequivocal. His mastery of the arts of evasion and ambiguity had once caused a frustrated opponent, Joe Higgins, to compare the task of getting a straight answer from him to ‘playing handball against a haystack’. This time there was no masking of his true feelings, none of the babble of barely connected words that often left his listeners unsure about almost everything, not least whether the man was an idiot or a genius. This time, he was direct, eloquent and so sincere that not even the greatest sceptic could doubt that the tears in his eyes and the catch in his throat were involuntary symptoms of powerful emotion.
    And so, in June 2006, Bertie Ahern stood at the graveside of his master, Charles Haughey, in Saint Fintan’s Cemetery in Sutton and called him ‘a patriot to his fingertips’: ‘The definition of a patriot is someone who devotes all their energy to the betterment of their countrymen. Charles Haughey was a patriot to his fingertips.’ The catch in his voice came in his peroration when he referred to Haughey as ‘Charlie, Boss’, pausing for effect between the two terms, so that the second gathered its full resonance as a tribal act of homage to the lost leader.
    But before then he had managed to articulate with some
precision the message that was to go forth from the graveside: ‘When the shadows have faded the light of his achievements will remain.’ Those shadows were cast, of course, by the towering skyscrapers of money that the Boss had accumulated while holding high political office: the equivalent in 2006 of about €45 million, or 171 times his total salary payments as a full-time politician. Corruption, Ahern was saying, even on such a heroic scale, was of little long-term consequence. This was a serving Taoiseach, speaking at a formal state funeral (which cost the taxpayer at least €500,000, including €35,000 for food and drink for the invited guests). He was affirming as official policy the idea that theft, deception and fraud on a grand scale were relatively minor matters in Ireland.
    For most of the previous decade, since his grandiose crookery was first confirmed by the report of the McCracken tribunal of inquiry in 1997, Haughey had been treated as Fianna Fáil’s reprobate uncle, a family embarrassment whose scandalous behaviour should not, however, be held against the present generation. The state funeral was, however, a calculated act of contrition for these attempts to distance the party from the Boss. This act of collective homage was solemnised by the party’s young princeling, the future Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan - son, namesake and political heir of one of Haughey’s closest allies. Haughey had stolen €250,000 from a fund set up to pay for a liver transplant for Lenihan’s father, whom Haughey described as ‘one of my closest personal friends and certainly my closest political friend’. In a sign that even this was to be forgiven and forgotten, Lenihan did the first reading at Haughey’s funeral Mass. It was a potent statement of the official ethic - you could steal from your