Watching paint dry might have exercised a greater attraction than the tribunal on a day entirely devoted to the reading into the record of the evidence of Mr Joseph Murphy snr.
Mr Murphy, the building millionaire whose company paid money to Mr Ray Burke in controversial circumstances, gave evidence in private near his home in Guernsey over the past few weeks, but as promised Mr Justice Flood arranged for this to be made public once the tribunal returned to Dublin.
But in an age when court judgments are delivered over the Internet, there has to be a better way than laboriously reading every word to an audience of lawyers who have already heard them. In fact, most of the lawyers excused themselves from the tedium, though a few remained behind to save the chairman the embarrassment of an empty house.
Those present agreed not to pursue the various objections they made during the course of Mr Murphy's evidence, which meant the registrar of the tribunal, Mr Peter Kavanagh, could perform his one-man show without interruption.
While Mr Murphy's companies, and his son, Joseph jnr, are centrally involved in this tribunal, the position of the 82-year-old patriarch of the Murphy empire is altogether more peripheral.
Even so, it was astounding to learn that during the first four days of his evidence, the name of his former right-hand man and present-day tormentor, Mr James Gogarty, came up just once.
So far has this tribunal been diverted down a side-road that almost a week was spent recounting Mr Murphy's early life, the labyrinthine details of his business and banking affairs and his relationship with the one-time chief executive of his companies, the late Liam Conroy.
When Mr Murphy was finally asked about Mr Gogarty on the fifth day of his evidence, he quickly and firmly asserted that it was Mr Gogarty and not he who had complete control of the Murphy-owned lands in north Dublin. Mr Murphy alleged Mr Gogarty was taking back-handers on the land and that he "haunted" his boss for months to persuade him to sell them.
"He would say those lands were a nuisance and the money would be better off in the bank where it would earn interest of 14 to 16 per cent. He said the lands would remain agricultural and would never be any use for building."
"Sell-sell-sell" was the message from Mr Gogarty, the witness claimed. Mr Gogarty, in contrast, maintains he at all times followed his employer's instructions in putting the lands up for sale. The developer, Mr Michael Bailey, eventually bought them. This is likely to be examined in further detail when the second half of Mr Murphy's evidence is read today.
It emerged last month during Mr Murphy's successful application to have the press excluded that he suffers from a variety of mental and physical ailments. However, the impression that emerged yesterday was of an elderly man in full possession of his faculties and well able to score points against his enemies. If the witness did have a weakness, it related to his powers of recall, particularly his residency or property holdings. He failed to mention houses he owned in Ireland and Spain until these were pointed out to him.
He gave Mr Conroy short shrift. Mr Conroy had told him he was Cambridge-educated, an architect and a pilot who had flown all over the world, but Mr Murphy subsequently discovered that none of this was true. Mr Conroy was a "con-man" who had told "a pack of lies" and set out to destroy Mr Murphy after he was sacked from the company.
Mr Gogarty alleges that Mr Murphy sold off his lands in north Dublin in a hurry because he was afraid that the Revenue Commissioners might come to hear of the allegations of tax evasion made against him by Mr Conroy when the latter took an unfair dismissal action.
Yesterday, we learned that Mr Murphy denied these allegations and said he had "no anxieties, no worries" about the content of Mr Conroy's affidavit in this case. Yet we also learned that the case was settled with a payment of £620,000 to Mr Conroy in return for the strictest conditions of secrecy.
Mr Conroy was required to promise never to divulge the agreement, to retract his allegations and to return all documents relating to the case to Mr Murphy. But as Mr Murphy noted, the substantial payment received by Mr Conroy created its own tax problem, so Mr Conroy was unlikely to ruin it all by divulging anything to the Revenue Commissioners.