But as we have seen time and time again, the more that the Taoiseach muddies the waters around what are sweetly termed by Mahon Tribunal counsel Des O'Neill as "goodwill funds", the less people want to know and the easier it is for him to present himself as an innocent victim of some sort of malicious campaign.

Last week, the Taoiseach got his chance to do what he has insisted he has been straining at the leash to accomplish . . . clear up any misunderstandings that may have arisen over the sizeable amounts of cash that kept landing in his hands in 1994 and 1995 when he moved from being minister for finance, to leader of the opposition, to taoiseach.

The victim But confident and breezy as he seemed for the cameras, the Taoiseach's version of events is still very much at odds with the records at the bank where his partner, Celia Larkin, administered a number of accounts on his behalf.

The Taoiseach has become very adept at portraying himself as the victim ever since the Mahon Tribunal's investigation of the �30,000 payment from businessman and friend Micheal Wall first came to light.

It was he, and not the media, who introduced the fact of his marital break-up into the story . . .during his emotional interview with Bryan Dobson . . . as justification for the strange, cash-rich nature of his finances.

Last week, his first words to the Mahon Tribunal were a 15-minute statement of selfjustification, a man hounded and hurt by malicious rumours about bribes and blackmail . . .none of which the general public had ever heard of, and none of which the tribunal lawyers were the least bit interested in.

He became a lot less forthcoming, however, as monosyllabically and haltingly, he was forced to admit that it is he . . . and not the Mahon Tribunal . . . who has been delaying the proceedings at every step of the way, so that it is only now, almost three years on, that he can state on record to the Tribunal: "I have done nothing improper. I have done no wrong and wronged no one."

One has to ask why . . . if he was so keen to clear his name, quash rumours, and cooperate transparently with the very tribunal system he helped to set up . . . he did not furnish all the information from the outset.

It was Ahern who, when he set up the tribunal system and the McCracken Tribunal to investigate the bribing of his former mentor Charles J Haughey, insisted on the importance of following the money trail.

Yet he has used the time-honoured techniques of all those who have sought to delay the work of the tribunal . . . legal challenges, failing to produce full documentation, evasion and obfuscation (the latest being the production of a retired banker to prove the foreign exchange activities he failed to reveal for over a year are not, as the tribunal suggests, a dollar transaction, but in fact a sterling exchange).

There is no real need to go into the details, yet again, of the whip-rounds, cash in envelopes, cash in wardrobes, cash thought to have been produced in the Taoiseach's now-deceased former solicitor Gerry Brennan's office, but actually laid out in wads on the table in St Luke's.

What's relevant is the fact that . . . and he does not deny this . . . Bertie Ahern received payments from both strangers and friends when he was minister for finance in 1994 and taoiseach in 1995. One was as the result of a whip-round following an informal talk about the Irish economy in 1994 when he was a serving minister for finance, another was made up of loans from friends, yet another was a cash lump sum from businessman Micheal Wall to pay for stamp duty and refurbishments on a house he was renting.

His then partner, Celia Larkin . . . a less than helpful witness . . . has changed her story three times about the manner in which those payments were received, lodged and exchanged in currency. She has failed to recall 99 elements of that time. The Taoiseach has changed his version of events about the purchase of the house three times, his final version differing significantly from that offered by Celia Larkin and his friend Micheal Wall, who was buying the house and renovating it so that Bertie Ahern could rent it with a view to purchasing later.

He has done wrong Bertie Ahern says he has done no wrong. This is not true. He admitted as much when he agreed, under presure from his political peers, to new ethics legislation under which politicians would be required to seek approval from the Standards in Public Offices Commission for all gifts and donations over 2,000.

He may not have broken the letter of the law as it stood back in 1994, but he certainly broke the spirit of it. To continue with that misrepresentation . . . as part of a statement to a tribunal . . . is to offend the public's goodwill and test its tolerance.

Now in his third term, Ahern won that goodwill during the election campaign, thanks to a rueful smile, just enough contrition about what he has no choice but to admit to, a finely modulated level of outrage at some of the wilder allegations he likes to throw into the ring and, on the political level, a good track record on the economy and the peace process, mixed with a wily ability to savage the opposition by raising the spectre of financial meltdown if they were put in charge.

Differing versions We have been offered many versions of how Ahern came across the money, who put it in the bank, whether he had a driver's licence or notf but none tallies sufficiently with the records supplied by AIB's officials. This is nothing to do with "power mathematics", to use Bertie Ahern's memorable phrase. What the public needs is a clear explanation for what is written down in black and white in the bank's records.

It's all very well for Bertie Ahern to sigh and wish that the Manchester businessman Tim Kilroe had given him a season ticket for Manchester United instead of a brown envelope stuffed with stg�8,000 in cash. He probably just wished he'd bought his own house in a more conventional way, just wished he hadn't accepted loans from friends or dealt in quite so much cash. But he didn't.

His election as Taoiseach for the third time demonstrates that the electorate is willing to accept him, despite the low standards he followed at this time, because of his undoubted leadership abilities as well as the personal charm with which so many connect.

But as far as his political legacy is concerned, for him to say he did no wrong in accepting so much cash is simply not true.