Politics Features

 

Despite the fact that the men from the IMF were clearly Dublin bound, the denials came thick and fast. But ignoring the obvious has quite a tradition.

JOE gives five examples, starting with Brian, Brian, Dermot, Batt and the men from the IMF...

By Nick Bradshaw

You have to wonder if Bill Clinton offered Biffo some advice when he was last in Dublin. Maybe he sat him down and offered tips on how to spoof your way through a crisis.

“Listen Biff,” Bill might have said, “Just do as I did. Look the camera in the eye, don’t blink and say ‘I am not having sexual relations with the men from the IMF’.”

Unfortunately, it was probably at that point that the robust and womanly form of Mary Harney walked past, distracting red-blooded Bill and causing him to omit the fact that when he tried this particular approach, following an extra-curricular act in the Oval Office with his intern Monica Lewinsky, he ended up in deep doo-doo – impeached and forced by his wife Hillary to sleep on the sofa.

And so Offaly’s Own trotted out his dubious assertion that the bean counters from the International Monetary Fund were not on their way to bail us out. When nobody believed him, he got Brian Lenihan to do the same, then Dermot Ahern, then Batt O’Keeffe.

They were meant to back him up, but instead it us it just made them all look dodgy. Just as Bill Clinton managed to twist things to allow him to say that, as long as he didn’t reach fourth base, ‘sexual relations’ didn’t occur, Brian and the other FF top brass were able to say that they were not having preliminary talks with the EU/IMF money lenders.

It's obvious now - what they were doing was having pre-preliminary talks.

Presumably these talks included making arrangements detailing when the money men were to fly over, who was going to pick them up from the airport, who was going to arrange a place to stay and get them access to all the country’s financial records.

Just how we could have all mistakenly thought that these were bailout talks is clearly ridiculous. How misguided we all are.

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