TRIBUNAL SKETCH:SOME PEOPLE forget, others are too young to remember, but times were bad in Ireland, back in the eighties and nineties, writes Miriam Lord.
Unless you happened to be a Charlie Haughey or a Bertie Ahern. In an era of belt tightening and dole queues, CJH and the Bert were money magnets. Haughey, living in ostentatious luxury in his Gandon mansion, was eventually found out.
But Bertie? Well, that's different. He took a few bob during a difficult time in his life, but he's a decent skin, living in semi-detached solitude in a nice house in a quiet suburban estate.
Give the guy a break.
But the mounting evidence coming from the Mahon tribunal tells a far different story.
How long can his Government colleagues choose to ignore it? More proof came, if it were needed, that the cash sloshing around Bertie Ahern was not small beer. Bewildering amounts of money flew in his direction from all over the place.
By no stretch of already overstretched imaginations, could the latest dispatches from the castle be consigned to the heart-tugging territory of digouts and whip-rounds. (Although 25 unnamed people had a whip around to pay the £56,000 for St Luke's in 1988. No documentation survives.)
Bertie Ahern's Mahon tribunal money trail is long and very complex. It is all too easy to tire of the endless talk of bank accounts and financial transactions, and who gave what and when.
But a few hours spent listening to the evidence of Tim Collins in the witness box would surely have given pause for thought to the most ardent defenders of Ahern the ordinary.
Collins cast himself in the role of Bertie's little helper. Never a member of the party, he said he just made himself available to help his friend out during election times. Part of his duties included fundraising and administering a couple of bank accounts for the Ahern electoral machine.
"Mr chairman, figures are not my forte," he declared early on, to titters from the gallery.
This didn't prevent him being placed in sole charge of an election account and the B/T account, a contingency fund for St Luke's, Bertie's headquarters.
Tim can hardly remember a thing about the time his B/T account was doing a roaring trade in lodgements and withdrawals.
He was "just a helper, in the general sense of the word". Where the B/T fund was concerned, he had one mantra, and he repeated it again and again: "It was a sinking fund."
Bertie Ahern told the tribunal it was emergency money, in case the need arose for major expenditure on St Luke's. He mentioned the possibility of building an extension.
Tim, on the other hand, is of the express opinion that the fund is to protect the trustees, in the event of something terrible happening to Bertie, leaving them saddled with a debt on the property.
The tribunal couldn't understand this, as the Taoiseach himself has stressed in his sworn testimony that he doesn't own the building.
Clueless Tim was all at sea too.
But he stuck to his sinking story of the "sinking fund", needed if "Bertie Ahern got knocked down or anything like that."
Going on the evidence of the myriad bank accounts operated independently of the party by the Taoiseach's kitchen cabinet - known as the "Drumcondra mafia" - there was every possibility of Bertie being knocked down by a 16A bus as he crossed the main road between St Luke's on one side and the AIB and Irish Permanent on the other.
Bertie and the boys have done very well out of elections. In 1989, Fianna Fáil proper established an election bank account in the name of the constituency's joint treasurer; a lady living in Phibsboro. It dealt in the usual dribs and drabs.
But there was another account Fianna Fáil North-Central account in the same bank. Its statements went to to Bertie Ahern and Joe Burke, "care of the AIB". Documents relating to it never left the bank.
After the election, it had a healthy surplus of £17,000.
The B/T account was set up in the same year.
Twenty years ago, it built up the equivalent of €113,000 over six years. Not a ha'penny of it went towards the upkeep of St Luke's. That is because there was a fourth account, in the name of Bertie's tight little O'Donovan Rossa Cumann. Fifty grand went through that one in just six months, around the time St Luke's was purchased.
That building has been nothing but trouble. As soon as it was bought, it started to sink. Work had to be done. The money is supposed to have come out of the cumann fund.
And so to the election in 1992. The official constituency bank account was administered by a grassroot from Glasnevin. After the election, it was €15,000 in the red. On the other hand, a St Luke's election fund set up by Tim Collins finished the election a healthy £28,000 to the good.
Meanwhile, his B/T account was flying. Thirty thousand went into it from "golf classics".
When Des O'Neill pointed out to Tim that the constituency didn't hold its "inaugural" golf classic until five years later, he was nonplussed.
Another 30,000 was given to Celia Larkin, Bertie's then life partner, to buy a house.
A "humanitarian" act, insisted Tim.
All the while, St Luke's was sinking into the nearby Tolka. Tim was adamant the sinking fund would never be touched until Bertie was knocked down by a bus. Right enough, funerals can be expensive, but somebody might have told him that Bertie will be entitled to a State funeral when that unhappy day comes around.
Strangely enough, £4,000 and £3,000 were withdrawn from the sinking fund to pay for some pint-sinking functions in St Luke's. For "neighbours" and "builders" and "official people."
Tim's assertion that this fund is sacrosanct came under further pressure when it emerged that £20,000 was withdrawn when the left side wall of St Luke's began to sink.
The money was given to Joe Burke, "the builder", in cash.
Tim Collins, who withdrew the money from the B/T account, didn't hand it straight to Joe, who specialised in pub refurbishment.
He thinks he might have brought it to St Luke's in an envelope and said to somebody: "Make sure Joe Burke gets that". He never found out if he did. But he says Joe couldn't do the job, and apparently the 20 grand was repaid into the account a few months later. Tim thinks he may have done this, but he can't remember.
Nor can he remember that £20 was exchanged into parity rate punts in the same bank, at the exact same time, by the teller he dealt with.
Nobody in St Luke's would have batted an eyelid when Tim arrived with his bulging envelope. This is the place where Michael Wall handed over 30,000 in cash to Bertie.
No wonder St Luke's was sinking - it was the weight of all the cash.
The urgent repair was carried out a number of years later. They must have been wearing water wings in St Luke's by then.
Was Tim Collins' evidence credible? No. Bring in the TV cameras quick. People need to witness this farrago.