And so on.

Our relationship with money is essentially part of our psychic history and people know this. Certainly, Bertie squirrelling away a load of cash didn't do him or his party any harm in the general election. Rightly or wrongly, it was judged by the public to be something that wasn't really political . . .

something that had no general implications. In that sense . . . and that alone . . . the issue was like Bill Clinton's extramarital philandering. Powerful members of the Republican Party spent a huge amount of time and energy trying to rouse the people into the indignation that was necessary if that president was to be successfully impeached. But the people would not respond.

Sex is simple, compared to money. From the point of view of a fiction writer or anyone interested in how character shapes plot, Bertiegate is more interesting than Monicagate. Nothing very new was learned about Bill Clinton when he was, so to speak, exposed.

Fidelity and loyalty were never qualities he proffered. But the Bertie money thing, no matter what happens next . . . including nothing happening next and the whole thing being innocently explained away . . . directs our attention to the mystery of Bertie Ahern's personality. What is Bertie like?

For example, the night that Fianna Fail's success in the election became clear and Bertie should by any standards have been happy and triumphant, he snarled instead.

When he was besieged by the media there was suddenly a rent in his bland facade. You people, he crowed to the reporters around him (I don't remember the exact words, but this is what I remember being said) . . . you people thought you'd damaged me with the money revelations, but you hadn't. You with your big salaries, he sneered. You thought you'd got me but you were wrong. You and your big salaries "and your expenses, " he said.

It was the expenses point that amazed me . . . the tone, as if he half-envied journalists for getting expenses and half-despised them.

He can't possibly have meant it. He can't really have thought of himself as poor little Bertie and the hacks as big earners, rolling in extra money. He knew perfectly well that what he gets in pay and allowances and expenses as Taoiseach and a longtime TD is way beyond the range of the newspaper and broadcasting workers crowding around him.

But he wanted to insult the media workers to pay them back for giving him a hard time during the campaign (insofar as they did) and in the euphoria of his victory the only words that came to mind were the ludicrous ones that insinuated that media people had pursued the money story so as to line their pockets with 'expenses'. I can think of many things I might accuse the Irish press pack of.

But the fact that they're entitled to expenses is no more an appropriate criticism of them than it is of Bertie himself or any other member of the Oireachtas or anyone else whose pay includes expenses.

And that's exactly what's so interesting . . .

that, when his self-control slipped and he wanted to express animosity, what came to his mind was money. It may be that Bertie, the deeply private man, associates money with shame. Did he think, for example, that the hacks who were on expenses were ashamed of it? How, otherwise, did his jeer make sense?

Is money exceptionally important to him . . .

as it can be to anyone, wealthy or not? Does it sit at the centre of his consciousness? He was an accountant who married a bank official; do these occupations affect attitudes to cash itself? Or could having a lot of actual cash stashed away have something to do with his sense of security? Or perhaps there was somebody he didn't want to share it with or did want to share it with? Or maybe he's near-pathologically afraid of poverty? These are speculations, not serious questions, but what I mean to suggest by them is that though Bertie is being asked questions about the money in the public sphere, the answers may not lie in the public sphere at all.

They may belong to his private life and he may, if he's covering up, be covering up nothing more than what he's like. It has somehow been sold to us that Bertie is simple and ordinary but there was always an element of evasion, not to mention of class condescension, in characterising him . . . largely because of his accent . . . as just a regular Dub who likes a couple of pints with his pals while they talk about GAA games. There's quite obviously more to the Taoiseach than that. He's extremely clever and ambitious, for one thing, and usually very patient and, of course, he's a devoted father. Yet forces of which we know nothing led him to situations . . . such as the breakup of his family and such as his parting from Celia Larkin . . . which were not calculated to advance his ambition.

Some turbulence, somewhere, is evidently operative within him. So there's this lesson to be learnt from the story of him and the AIB cash, even if nothing else is learned: no person is as simple as the shorthand descriptions of them we work with.