It’s amazing how quickly things change in politics. This morning on Newstalk’s Breakfast Show, Ciaran “Dance with the Devil” Cuffe followed Mary O’Rourke’s indignant, obfuscating defence of Bertie Ahern with a nauseating refusal to stand up for what used to be Green principles. Let’s have a look (or listen via podcast) at what he had to say at the start of the interview:
“Claire Byrne: Are you rattled by this passport business?
Ciaran Cuffe: Ah, no, not at all … eh, I …
CB: Have you dropped your standards, in the Greens then?
CC: No, I don’t think so … look, we set out by saying we’re not the … the guardians of our colleagues in office”
This is hardly the kinda weak response to serious allegations of wrong doing that I would have expected from the guy who wrote the following about Bertie Ahern after the election (not during or before the election in order to win votes):
“I worry about his moral compass……I still worry about a story told about Bertie when the old Sorting Office on Sheriff Street was still operating. A small crack in a pane of glass was letting in a draft and the Super wasn’t prepared to fix it. Bertie’s advice was to advice the post sorter to throw a brick through the window and ensure that the whole window got fixed.”
Has Deputy Cuffe got the wrong end of the stick in relation to the Broken Window Theory? Eight months ago he was worried about the Bertie’s moral compass and was considering spending some of his free time post-election monitoring the Mahon Tribunal:
“Maybe I’ll even take some time off to see how the Mahon Tribunal unfolds”.
But now that the Green Party are keeping this morally questionable leader in place by supporting the coalition, Cuffe is not worried (rattled) by Ahern’s dealings with a millionaire businessman who donated $10,000 to Fianna Fail (FF) which seems to have gone missing. There seems to be a contradiction here.
I’d be interest to know how Deputy Cuffe squares this circle both to himself and his party membership. Maybe he considers supporting a Haghey-esque figure, like Ahern, as a necessary evil in order to fulfill his climate change related goals. If that’s the case then all I can do is paraphrase Toby Ziegler from The West Wing and say: “Ah it’s real easy to stick to principles when nothing’s at stake Ciaran”. It seems like there’s only one (or should that be ten thousand) kind of green that makes a difference in modern Ireland ……..
