The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, yesterday again changed his account of foreign exchange transactions being investigated by the Mahon tribunal.
Mr Ahern, who had been expected initially to give evidence over two days, has now given evidence for three days and is set to return to the witness box again, possibly as soon as next Monday. The Dáil returns after the summer break on Wednesday.
The examination of Mr Ahern by tribunal counsel Des O'Neill SC is proceeding very slowly and it is possible, if not probable, that Mr Ahern will be in the witness box for a number of days before the current series of sittings is concluded.
The tribunal is investigating four cash lodgements totalling almost £85,000, which were made over a 13½-month period from October 1994.All of the transactions were preceded by foreign exchange transactions.
The tribunal is due to recall Mr Ahern for further questioning on other aspects of his personal finances, probably some time next year.
The tribunal initiated an inquiry into Mr Ahern's finances because of an allegation by developer Tom Gilmartin that another developer, Owen O'Callaghan, had given money to Mr Ahern.
Both Mr O'Callaghan and Mr Ahern have denied that this is the case.
Yesterday, there was clapping when, during questioning, Mr Ahern commented: "I hope Mr Gilmartin gets the same grilling on these things as I am, but anyway that's neither here nor there."
A small crowd waited for Mr Ahern outside the tribunal after the hearing. The majority cheered him loudly, though some people booed and jeered. When the tribunal members came out, a small number of the assembled gathering clapped, while the rest remained silent.
Mr O'Neill, in his questioning yesterday, returned to the issue of how forthcoming Mr Ahern had been with the requests for information he had received from the tribunal in the period since November 2004.
At one point the chairman, Judge Alan Mahon, said information that would have been "vital" to the tribunal's inquiries had been left out of responses given by Mr Ahern in correspondence with the tribunal. Leaving out this information had effectively left a "hole" in the money trail, the judge said.
Much of the questioning yesterday concerned the cash withdrawal of £50,000 from AIB, O'Connell St, Dublin, in January 1995. Mr Ahern told the tribunal in an interview in private earlier this year that he used some of this money to purchase £30,000stg in cash, which he later relodged to the bank.
When the tribunal subsequently checked the branch's records, it found no record of any such sale of sterling.
All the sterling sales in the records were for significantly smaller amounts.
Yesterday Mr Ahern said it was "very likely" that he had asked someone else to buy the sterling, as he would have been so busy at the time.
He also said the sterling could have been bought in "instalments" and may have been purchased somewhere other than AIB O'Connell St.
Last week, in a statement he read out at the tribunal, Mr Ahern altered his account of a lodgement made by him in October 1994, which he said comprised £16,500 given to him by four friends in a "dig-out", and approximately £8,000 in sterling cash given to him by supporters in Manchester.
He agreed with Mr O'Neill that these changes rendered "meaningless" an analysis the tribunal had conducted of Mr Ahern's earlier account of these matters.
At the outset of yesterday's questioning Mr Ahern agreed that all of the transactions he was being asked about were "memorable" events.
