Listening to Mr Michael Lowry giving evidence, it is difficult not to recall the extraordinary statement he made to the Dβil following his resignation as a government minister in November 1996.
In that statement, he protested that he was not trying to hide the fact that Mr Ben Dunne had given him money. People trying to hide money, he said, would put it in offshore accounts. It subsequently emerged that he had a number of offshore accounts holding undisclosed income.
The statement to the Dβil was delivered after a lengthy period of preparation. It is presumably this history of having made a misleading statement of great importance which prompted remarks by the chairman, Mr Justice Moriarty, on Tuesday, when he reassured Mr Lowry that all his evidence would be considered seriously.
Yesterday, the chairman told the former Fine Gael minister that the tribunal had to look "crucially" at why it was not told until April of this year about an account Mr Lowry had with Irish Nationwide in the Isle of Man in 1996 and 1997.
So Mr Lowry is coming from a position where his evidence is being treated with perhaps more professional scepticism than is usually the case at tribunals.
Furthermore, his evidence is frequently jarring. For instance, the Isle of Man account, which was opened in September 1996 and into which £147,000 was subsequently lodged by the late Mr David Austin, was not, Mr Lowry said, opened in order to conceal anything.
It could just as well have been opened inside the jurisdiction as far as he was concerned, he said. It was, he said, Mr Austin's idea that the account - in the then minister's name - be opened in the Isle of Man, and the reasons for this were never explained to him by Mr Austin. (At one stage, Mr Jerry Healy SC, for the tribunal, said to Mr Lowry: "You are not a child.") The money from Mr Austin was a loan, Mr Lowry said, to pay for the renovation of a £200,000 house in Blackrock, Co Dublin.
The loan, at commercial interest rates, was to be for five years even though, at the time it was given, Mr Austin had been diagnosed as having terminal cancer.
He was not expecting to live to see the new century, a friend, Mr Michael O'Leary, has already told the tribunal. According to Mr Lowry, the £147,000 was to be used over a period of six months or so, amounts to be drawn down as needed for the renovation work on his new house. Yet the account opening form displayed at the tribunal yesterday is for a fixed interest account.
An annotation on Mr Lowry's application form indicates that his money was to be deposited for seven years, at a fixed rate of 5.5 per cent. Mr Lowry said this annotation on the form concerning the term and interest rate was not written by him and that he did withdraw the money after three months. Irish Nationwide Bank on the Isle of Man has refused to send a staff member to be questioned about the account.
The money in the account was returned by Mr Lowry to Mr Austin in February 1997, on the day the McCracken tribunal was established. The reason the money is of such interest is that it had come to Mr Austin from his friend Mr Denis O'Brien.