It was all hands to the pumps as the coalition ship began to take on water yesterday. The day opened with a telephone call from Bertie Ahern to Mary Harney, admitting to having been wrong about the number of his meetings with Tom Gilmartin.

The Progressive Democrats were not impressed. Having offered qualified support to the Taoiseach on Monday in his difficulties over the £50,000 paid to Padraig Flynn, they were being asked to extend his political credit.

It took internal PD consultations to settle things down. And only to the extent that they demanded Mr Ahern make a full explanation to the Dail today and answer questions. Then they would make up their minds.

It didn't qualify as a happy arrangement.

The political pressure was fierce. John Bruton and Ruairi Quinn were both targeting the Progressive Democrats as the people elected to keep Fianna Fail straight. If Mary Harney did not insist on proper standards being maintained, what protection was there?

The Labour leader twisted the knife by recalling this was the third time the Tanaiste had been misled. First, there was the Rennicks payment Mr Ahern had failed to tell her about; then he had misled her about the appointment of a tax appeals commissioner, and now he was found to be wrong about the number of meetings with Mr Gilmartin.

If the Taoiseach could not recall that, might he not also have forgotten being told about the £50,000 donation to Mr Flynn in 1989? And if Mr Gilmartin's version of events was correct where the meetings were concerned, did that not lend credibility to his assertion that Mr Ahern had sought a contribution from him?

These were tricky questions in the light of the Flood tribunal. And they had - in the words of Mr Bruton - already drawn a "vague and sketchy response" from the Taoiseach.

Last Sunday Mr Ahern said he had no recollection of such a conversation - not that it had not happened, just that he did not remember it. And he defiantly repeated that line yesterday.

But the water was rising in the bilges. Old Leinster House hands were nervously checking the location of lifeboats - just in case.

Fianna Fail ministers put on brave faces. The Taoiseach had told them in Cabinet he had nothing to hide. So they advised him to make a clean breast of it. And if that involved shafting the remnant of the old country-and-western wing, tough. Padraig Flynn must have felt the draught in Brussels.

Some ministers believed Mr Ahern had sufficient political cover to ride out the present storm. And the key lay in a late submission to the Flood tribunal by Sean Sherwin, the party's national organiser.

Alarm bells had rung for more than Mr Flynn last September, when news of a £50,000 donation to an unnamed Fianna Fail minister broke. The party's failure to provide the tribunal with the full details of the Rennicks payment was still fresh in many minds. So Mr Sherwin's submission was valuable insurance, even if it was triggered by the tribunal.

Given the "oversight" on the Rennicks payment, however, the new disclosure sat unhappily in the context of Mr Ahern's public insistence that "every support must be given to the tribunal to do its work".

Mr Sherwin is said to have informed the tribunal that, in 1989, Mr Gilmartin advised him of a £50,000 payment made to Mr Flynn. This information was alleged to have been conveyed to Mr Paul Kavanagh, the party fundraiser, at the time.

Mr Sherwin is also said to have advised Mr Albert Reynolds in 1992 about the allegations, shortly before he appointed Mr Flynn to his first cabinet. But this is bluntly denied by Mr Reynolds, who said yesterday that he knew nothing about the matter.

Within Fianna Fail, everything was being dealt with at arm's length. There was no question of the Taoiseach becoming directly involved.

So it was Fianna Fail head office - rather than Mr Ahern - that tried, unsuccessfully, to raise the issue with Mr Flynn. And it was Fianna Fail, rather than Mr Ahern, which was "not satisfied" by the response. But nothing of this became public until now. And the Taoiseach's knowledge of the affair dated only from last September.

While all this was going on Mr Ahern was ordering a new code of ethics for the party and putting clear blue water between himself and the old party image.

Fianna Fail is beset by a serious denial syndrome. It stretches back to the Haughey years when the then Taoiseach knew nothing about his personal finances and left the unorthodox raising of millions to the discretion of Des Traynor.

Mr Ray Burke suffered from amnesia regarding certain payments now being investigated by the Flood tribunal. Meetings, details, conversations and sums of money from that period are now all mixed up and mangled in the recollections of the most senior members of the party.

It is possible that nobody will ever be called to account.

Mr Flynn is already advancing a defence that would place him outside the ambit of Mr Justice Flood, who was asked to investigate corruption in the planning process. No favours were sought and none given in relation to the £50,000 donation, the line runs, so no planning offence was involved. And if the money never reached head office, that would be a matter between himself, Mr Gilmartin and Fianna Fail.

The whole unsavoury business has given a bite to today's post-Christmas opening of the Dail.

The opposition parties are in full cry.

But those who matter most to Fianna Fail - the Progressive Democrats and four independent TDs - are keeping their powder dry. There is no sense of imminent collapse.

Sinn Fein was emboldened to offer itself as "the only real alternative to the politics of sleaze" in next June's local elections, even as decommissioning threatened to bring down the Belfast Agreement.

It was a bad day for the Taoiseach. It opened with a large helping of his own words when he apologised to Ms Harney for a faulty memory. And his interview on RTE's Prime Time was poor.

Mr Ahern will need to lift his game considerably in the Dail today if things are not to get worse.