The editorial in The Irish Times of last Friday was wrong. There is no paradox between a majority of the electorate thinking Bertie Ahern was wrong to accept money from friends in Dublin and strangers in Manchester and still believe he is the preferred person to be Taoiseach of the country.
The electorate is saying the wrong in question was not so grievous as to require somebody who has led a government so successfully (in the eyes of the electorate) for almost 10 years to be forced from office.
Michael McDowell spoke of a sense of proportion in relation to all this and he was right and the electorate is right in bringing its own sense of proportion to bear on the issue. The reality is that Bertie Ahern has not been found to have done anything corrupt and, in the absence of that, he should be allowed continue.
My own view is that Bertie Ahern could face big trouble once the Planning tribunal gets around to examining his finances in the Quarryvale II module, but that is a different thing from saying he is in trouble now or that as of now, given what has been established, he should be driven from office.
Certainly there are questions for him to answer that so far he has failed to answer either at all or adequately. These include the following:
If, as he stated in a letter to me in August 1997 in answer to questions about his finances, he rented the house on Griffith Avenue in 1995 with an option to purchase, what would the relevance have been of having the market value of the house determined in 1997 when he allegedly purchased the house (surely the option to purchase would have been at a price agreed when the option was granted)?
How does he explain his then partner, Celia Larkin, accompanying Micheál Wall, the person who bought the house and who then rented it and sold it on to Bertie, in Wall's first viewing of the house? Was there some prior arrangement with Micheál Wall which involved him buying the house, renting it to Bertie Ahern and then selling on the house at a pre-agreed price? If so, what was the nature of that arrangement and what was the purpose of it?
Why does he insist that the £16,500 given by the second group of friends (some of them very close friends) arose from his marital separation agreement, when that payment was made almost a year after the marriage separation agreement had been concluded?
How does he explain he was able to save £50,000 during a time when he must have been under financial strain after his marriage first broke up and at a time when he had no bank account?
Why did he ever lend any support to the Quarryvale/Liffey Valley development and, in doing so, rob the people of Neilstown/Balgaddy of a town centre?
But these are merely questions as of now. They are not evidence of any grievous wrong-doing. And in the absence of serious wrong-doing it is understandable the electorate wants to stand by him because he has many attractive qualities.
Bertie is a likeable, personable man. People feel comfortable with him. He is unthreatening. His ordinariness, his mangling of the English language, his vulnerability make him all the more appealing. But there is more.
He has led the Government very successfully - a Government that is seen by a majority of the electorate as very successful. The economy has boomed in the almost 10 years since he became Taoiseach. He has been crucial to the successes of the Northern peace process. He was brilliantly successful in getting agreement among governments to the new European Union constitution. Its failure with electorates in France and the Netherlands was hardly his fault.
Those of us with a different ideological perspective are critical of him for the inequality his policies have led to, the devastation of the health service, the inadequate educational system, the crisis in housing, the support for American foreign policy and the litany of other items on that different agenda.
But the unfortunate reality (unfortunate for us and for the victims of his policies) is that the majority of the Irish people doesn't share that agenda now and does share Bertie Ahern's agenda. And those people believe that the transgressions for which he was seen to apologise do not outweigh the considerable contribution he has made as Taoiseach over the nine years.
What is surprising however is the collapse of the Fine Gael poll ratings. Perhaps Brian Cowen and others are right that the electorate was forced to contemplate life without Bertie and in that moment rejected the Fine Gael alternative, Enda Kenny. If so, that would appear to be that. Unless . . . unless there is further and more damning evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Bertie Ahern between now and the election.
Alternatively the Fine Gael poll collapse may just be a reflection of the fact that Bertie Ahern did a superb television interview on RTÉ's Six-One news in which he spectacularly drew on that milk of human kindness that is there in abundance for him, a ploy never to be repeated - at least between now and June 2007.