Former Taois­each Bertie Ahern is not the only one who can blame the Mahon tribunal for the loss of his job.

As the 10-year inquiry crawls towards closure at Dublin Castle, actor Joe Taylor, who mined an industry from tribunal re-enactments on radio and television, is making a dramatic career switch to ward off the P45.

While tribunal lawyers were recharging their batteries during the summer recess for the final autumn lap of public hearings, Taylor was back in school learning everything there is to know about... asbestos.

After a decade of listening to experts drone on and on in the witness box about the vagaries of the construction industry and the planning process, he has opted for a new career that is all about buildings. He is about to become a professional asbestos analyst.

Taylor inspired a cult devotion with his nightly re-enactments of tribunal hearings on Vincent Browne's now defunct RTÉ radio programme.

A book and a theatre show with a title borrowed from the immortal words of the late whistleblower James Gogarty, Will We Get a Receipt for This? Will We ***k?, penned by Taylor, blossomed from the radio show.

He has worked on eight different tribunals, starting with the McCracken inquiry, and winning such fans as retired planning tribunal chairman Judge Feargus Flood, who attended Taylor's tribunal theatre show, not once, but twice. Now, however, like the Celtic Tiger itself, such rich harvests have become a thing of the past

While waiting to see Bertie Ahern off from the castle after completing his tribunal testimony last Tuesday, the former taoiseach's alter ego was facing up to what politicians call the new economic reality.

Nothing – not even global financial armageddon – concentrates the thespian's mind like the cobwebs being brushed off the 'closed for business' signs being readied for display in the state's tribunals.

Armed with a qualification from the British Occupational, Hygiene and Safety Institute in Maidstone, Kent, acquired during the summer, he is about to embark on a six-month apprenticeship with Asbestos Consultancy Services in Dublin.

"I did home studying before going over to Maidstone and sitting my exams the end of June," he disclosed.

"When I got home, I did a Fás course on safe pass that anyone who works on a site has to do and I got my qualification in that last Monday. My agent says to most actors, especially in times like these, 'you've got to find another source of income'.

"My wife, Margaret, has been running her own company, Asbestos Analysis & Monitoring, for the last seven years and my background is science. I qualified in microbiology and became a fellow of the Institute of Medical Science when I worked for the Department of Agriculture before I started acting."

Apart from playing one of the scribes in I, Keano, Taylor has had to turn down offers of theatre work in the last decade because of his nightly radio commitments. It puts him in the same starting-from-scratch situation as barristers returning to the Law Library looking for work after a protracted absence.

The actor's nest egg for just such a rainy day might not, however, quite match the savings of the nearly two dozen tribunal millionaires returning to ply their trade in the courts.