TAOISEACH BERTIE Ahern has insisted he is "a very simple person" and said Brian Cowen "won't be as polite as I am".
Interviewed on RTÉ's This Weekradio show yesterday, the Taoiseach said: "I think people say, well, he couldn't be just as he seems, so therefore they work out some huge plot. That's all nonsense. I'm a very simple person, I'm not any way complex."
Commenting on his relationship with Charles Haughey, he said: "I was never asked to do anything that wasn't proper or wasn't right and Charlie Haughey never asked me once in all of the years I was working for him to do anything that wasn't just part of my job and wasn't a correct thing to ask me."
Regarding the unsuccessful attempt of Albert Reynolds to secure the Fianna Fáil nomination for the 1997 presidential election, Mr Ahern said: "What I did or didn't do wasn't going to stop the tide for Mary McAleese."
Commenting on his successor, Brian Cowen, he said: "If there's a row on, he won't be as polite as I am. If somebody wants a row with Brian, if I was them I'd stay up late the night before, preparing for it."
Regarding the Mahon tribunal, he said: "I feel very, very unlucky and unfortunate in the extreme that Mr O'Callaghan and Mr Gilmartin fell out over a business deal - and I understand businessmen fall out over business deals - and unfortunately one of them decided to say that the other fellow had given me money and, then, everything comes down on top of me . . . Did I ever think that Mr O'Callaghan and Mr Gilmartin would be knocking strips off each other over a few hundred million and that I, for relatively small money, got caught into this?"
Interviewed for RTÉ's The Week in PoliticsTV programme, Mr Ahern revealed he had originally intended to step down as Taoiseach after the local and European elections next year.
