Bertie’s outburst wasn’t part of a Fianna Fáil master plan. It was worse than that |
The woman who asked for a word with Bertie Ahern spoke softly and carried a big chip. Unfortunately for the former taoiseach, doing his man-of-the-people bit for the Fianna Fáil candidate in Dublin Central, she also carried a smartphone.
“The hordes of foreigners coming into our country ... all these Indians, all these Muslims, all these Africans,” she began.
She rattled through the usual talking points with an equal-opportunities sense of grievance: Muslims with their “47 countries”, sharia (Islamic law), child brides, stabbings, open borders, globalism, the Ukraine war, transgender people, women’s safe spaces, hate speech laws, female genital mutilation, Africans and, weirdly, “Indians and their space programme”.
“You think there’s too many coming in?” he asked, in his most confident step-back-folks-I’ve-got-this manner. He had “no problem with the Ukrainians”, he said. Or, it seemed, “the Poles”.
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But he went on, marking 100 years of Fianna Fáil with one more incidence of Bertie Ahern putting his foot in it, “the ones I worry about are the Africans, I agree with you on the Africans. We can’t be taking in people from the Congo and all these places.”
When she brought up sharia, he replied: “I don’t worry about this........