The Iceman Lowry Returneth for a heated tribunal session

The Moriarty tribunal has been a cold place lately. No sooner had Norwegian witnesses drawn an arctic circle around their version of the Telenor donation to Fine Gael, than refrigeration consultant Michael Lowry was back on the stand yesterday.

Tribunal counsel wasted no time in turning the heat up on him, but only minor cracks had appeared in his evidence by the end of the first day, and more frost was expected overnight. It wasn't so much a case of the Iceman Cometh as the Iceman Returneth after a two-year absence.

Mr Justice Moriarty welcomed the witness back ruefully, pointing out that he remained under oath from his last appearance, "unfortunately a long time ago".

Significantly, it was Mr Lowry who was feeling rueful by close of business, when he admitted "regret" for not previously disclosing details of a £147,000 loan from Fine Gael fundraiser David Austin.

Much of the day until then had been a stand-off over what Mr Lowry called the "Telenor-Esat-New York event". In the light of more recent events in that city, there were uncomfortable references to a "list of targets" Fine Gael drew up in 1995, of businessmen prepared to pay for seats at the New York dinner hosted by John Bruton.

Mr Lowry insists he had nothing to do with the event. And yet as counsel pointed out, his name was all over the "hit-list" as the person who would "follow up" on invitees.

The chairman changed the metaphor by suggesting Mr Lowry had "three very evident hats" under which he should have been a central figure in the New York dinner. He was chairman of the party trustees; he was a minister; and he was a friend of the organiser, Mr Austin. But the three-hat trick was rumbled by Mr Lowry.

Not only was there no new information about the Telenor donation under any of the headgear, but in the attempts to find it, the witness himself disappeared. It was a sad feature of fund-raising, he said, that people who were expected to follow up contacts didn't always do so: "In this instance, I was guilty of it myself."

The thermostat is predicted to start out low again today and anyone attending the inquiry is advised to wear three hats and an overcoat.