IN the final days of Michael Lowry's tenure as a minister, frantic Fine Gael spin doctors tried vainly to divert the course of the guillotine blade. "Lookit," said one. "What you have to understand is Ben Dunne. He doesn't pay people like you or I would. It's all so bloody complicated. It's weird stuff."
And this is why, just five weeks before a general election, Ben Dunne's testimony on Monday will be like Russian roulette for our politicians and high octane entertainment for everyone else.
It is still quite a novel thing for the public to be able to hear directly from Mr Dunne. The 48 year old former supermarket magnate learned from his father to shun all publicity. Ben Dunne snr once said he would gladly give a radio interview, but would only say one thing: "Dunnes Stores, better value, beats them all."
In many other ways, Ben Dunne is a chip off the old block. His father opened the family's first shop in 1943, and worked, built and acquired, right up to a turnover of £10 million by 1964. When he died in 1983, Dunnes Stores had 64 branches, 3,500 employees and a £350 million turnover.
After his father's death, Ben Dunne and his brother Frank took over as joint managing directors, but Ben was the driving force. He too worked hard, continued the relentless expansion, and deliberately provoked milk and bread price wars with other chains.
Just as his father had bound Dunnes Stores' suppliers to the firm through exclusivity deals and unusual payment procedures, so the son brushed aside complaints that Dunnes forced suppliers to cut margins to the bone, and wait longer than anyone else (sometimes 12 weeks) to be paid.
But in as far as any son of a rich man can, the young Ben came up the hard way. Former classmates at Presentation Brothers College, Cork, say he did not shine academically, but that after school he worked hard in the shop, stacking shelves.
"He was always a little bit different," one recalls. "He used to wear a suit to school."
Young Ben limped through his Inter Cert, and immediately asked his father if he could leave the college.
He started at the fruit counter in the Patrick Street shop in Cork. He moved to Dublin four years later and worked both or shop floors and in the company's main office.
After the best part of 10 year had passed, Ben Dunne snr made him a director. By the mid 1970s he was at the heart of the family empire.
But the company's expansions and acquisitions throughout the decade and into the next were coming under scrutiny, in one quarter at least. The IRA reckoned the Dunnes must be good for a few bob.
The Irish Times reported on October 19th, 1981: "Despite an intensive hunt by police forces on both sides of the Border over the weekend, there was still no news early this morning of the whereabouts of the kidnapped supermarket millionaire, Mr Ben Dunne jnr, who was abducted from his car by four armed men just south of the Killeen Customs post in Co Louth on Friday morning."
Naturally, the Dunne family did everything it could to ensure he was let go, including trying to pay a large ransom, which was intercepted by the Garda. In the end he was apparently freed without any cash changing hands, on the promise that it would be paid later.
The Dunnes, in short, had managed to agree credit terms with the IRA.
After his release, he spoke of his six day ordeal, much of it spent with a hood over his head. His abductors repeatedly threatened him with guns, and he became resigned to the possibility of being shot dead. He was dragged blindfold through ditches, sat on in the back of speeding cars and forced to sleep on a hard floor.
At a Mass to celebrate his release, Ben Dunne said he had developed a relationship with God during his ordeal. As a captive, he had talked, prayed, even argued with God, Mr Dunne said, as if with someone on the telephone.
The next time Ben Dunne really hit the headlines, in May 1992, there must have been a busy signal on the direct line to heaven.
High on narcotics, abandoned even by Ms Denise Wojcik, the call girl from Escorts in a Flash who spent the night with him, Mr Dunne was teetering on a 17th floor Florida hotel balcony in the belief he could fly.
The police talked him down, and he pleaded no contest to cocaine possession. He was fined and sent to the spin drier to help him avoid drugs in the future.
Back home, the story enthralled much of the nation for weeks. It also gave the rest of the Dunne family, tired of Ben's autocratic style, the opportunity they had been waiting for to oust him as company chairman.
And it was this process that led, ultimately, to Monday's inquiry. A series of bruising and increasingly public legal battles began, and Ben Dunne was in time removed from the business. Leaked documents suggested highly unorthodox methods of rewarding suppliers, friends and politicians".
One public figure has already paid a high price for doing things the Dunne way. Next week we'll see how many more are to follow.