Bertie Does the Bertie Shuffle in Galway

galway | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Monday October 19, 2009 15:53 by Fred Johnston

Demonstrators had Fiery Public Support

Bertie Ahern scuttled hurriedly into Easons, Shop Street, Galway this afternoon to sign his book. Which he suddenly remembered he'd had written. Or hadn't.

Read it and Weep! Some Protestors in Galway.

Bertie Ahern did a right-foot shuffle through the doors of Easons bookshop in Galway's Shop Street today to avoid demonstrators whose placards at least were not fictions. This was Bertie's signing-on day and a cordoned-off table had been set up for him inside where he could plant his moniker on copies of the book he wrote and didn't write - it was ghost-written, fittingly. So the signature of the author was and at the same time was not on the book.

Meanwhile, scores of people leaving the shop announced to demonstrators their support for the modest demo and the anti-Bertie views expressed to those holding placards were sometimes startlingly extreme, given that they were declared by people of an age one does not often associate with such views. Times have changed. If Bertie thought that the queues inside the shop were a sign of his recovery in the public mind, he was very wrong. There was a sense of celeb and showbiz about the event, with young girls crowding at the windows to get a glimpse of . . . . anybody.

But it was remarked that a sense of schoolboy furtiveness seemed to accompany those who left with a copy of the book, as if they'd purchased something they'd rather not be seen reading. A plain brown wrapper type of book. Others made a joke about buying the book and emerged with a copy of a paperback thriller, which at least had the merit of being marketed as fiction.

{According to Eithne Tynan, radio critic of The Sunday Tribune, Bertie, asked on 'Today With Pat Kenny' what advice he would've offered to his one-time secretary, Grainne Carruth, had he been able to speak with her before her Tribunal appearance, replied (and I quote, with acknowledgement to The Sunday Tribune, October 18th '09): "What I would have told her, Pat, was 'If they have the evidence, just say you cannot recollect it.' " This sort of 'advice,' from the man who would be President of Ireland? Let's hope this book doesn't include more gems like this one. Isn't evidence collected at our Tribunals given UNDER OATH?}