The €85,000 spent on Bertie's office looks ugly alongside the tale of the drug addict jailed for theft at St Luke's, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
ONE WEEK, two offices, two stories. The two offices, as it happens, are both occupied by the former taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. One is the specially refurbished suite across the road from Leinster House on which we, the taxpayers, have spent, in these straitened times, €220,000. The other is the most famous office in Ireland - Ahern's constituency headquarters, St Luke's, in Drumcondra. Both made the news last week, in counterpointed stories that are perfect little vignettes of opulence and misery, of law and morality, of arrogance and squalor in contemporary Ireland.
On its own, the decision of the Office of Public Works to spend public money on Bertie's office tells us nothing we don't know already. It is not at all surprising that the €85,000 spent on carpets and furnishings for Bertie's office should be almost three times the maximum grant of €30,000 available for the adaptation of a house occupied by a person with disabilities. It's hard to muster much outrage at the fact that the total spent on the office is almost 40 times as much as the maximum that the taxpayer will spend adapting a house for an older person with mobility problems. Or that it's more than 20 times the maximum allowable to an elderly person "living in poor housing conditions to have essential repairs or improvements carried out". We don't really believe any more that we live in a republic where the "essential" needs of an anonymous oul wan or oul fella matter a fraction as much as the pomp and circumstance of a former taoiseach.
Put this little episode beside the other Bertie office story, however, and you get some sense of the deeper ironies of our current condition. The second story was the sentencing of a rather pitiful drug addict, Paul Bewley, for stealing a laptop computer and a rugby shirt from St Luke's. Again, the incident has a numbing familiarity to it. Bewley is one of those figures we take for granted in our society - a wreck of a man who emerged from the wreckage of a troubled childhood. He first appeared in the Children's Court 20 years ago when he was 16. Since then he's settled into an orderly pattern: rob stuff, sell it to buy drugs, get caught, plead guilty, do some time in prison, get out, rob stuff, sell it to buy drugs. He now has a grand total of 25 convictions. He's a poster boy for the failures of public policy on drugs and for the inability of the prison system to help most of those who come into it to clean up their lives.
So Paul Bewley is just another figment of the social failures to which we are inured. He wouldn't be worth singling out were it not for two things. One is that he was sufficiently out of his head (he told the guards that he was bored, noticed the security cameras and thought there might be something he could steal and sell for drugs) to wander into the most famous political office in Ireland and walk out with a laptop wrapped in a rugby shirt. The other is that the law, from the height of its majesty, came down on Paul Bewley with a seven-year jail sentence.
To put this into context, all you had to do was look at the court report next to this one in The Irish Times. It told us that a man had received a 2½-year sentence for sexually abusing three young sisters on six separate occasions. On the face of it, the crime of stealing goods worth a few thousand euro from Bertie Ahern's office is of far greater moral depravity than wrecking the lives of three innocent girls.
This is not a criticism of the judge in the St Luke's case, who obviously applied the law in the circumstances as she saw them and took account of Bewley's long list of previous crimes and the fact that he was also charged with robbing a petrol station. But the presumably unintended effect of the sentence was to suggest that Bertie Ahern's office is some kind of sacred domain whose violation represents an assault on the moral order, on a par with, say, a violent rape. The property of the Fianna Fáil constituency organisation in Drumcondra seems to enjoy an especially protected status.
Which would be fine if we'd never heard of the Mahon tribunal; if we hadn't been told of the so-called Building Trust fund for the same St Luke's and its extraordinary transactions; if Ahern himself hadn't given sworn evidence that he took money donated to Fianna Fáil locally and put it in his own building society account. Legally, there is a world of difference between Paul Bewley's cavalier approach to the property of Fianna Fáil in Drumcondra and that of Bertie Ahern himself. Bewley is a criminal; Ahern clearly is not.
But is that gulf as great as the one implied by the State's view that one man deserves to be locked up for seven years and the other to be showered with €85,000 worth of soft furnishings?