At the outset yesterday, Mr Justice Moriarty said he had made arrangements to receive independent medical opinion on Mr Charles Haughey's condition.
He expects to decide within the next fortnight how he intends to proceed.
Mr Haughey was due to return to the Mater Private Hospital in Dublin yesterday after having spent last week there. He is suffering from prostate cancer, which, his doctors say, has worsened considerably during the last six months. They say he should not be called to give further evidence, as the associated stress could shorten his life.
Property developer Mr Philip Monahan gave evidence yesterday about what he said was the pressure successful businessmen were placed under to make political donations.
Mr Monahan knows about political donations. His company, Monarch Properties, was mentioned in both the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael reports on payments to Dublin county councillors published earlier this year.
The reports were drafted after the dramatic evidence heard at the Flood tribunal from lobbyist Mr Frank Dunlop. Both reports are sprinkled with donations by Monarch Properties to councillors. The amounts involved are small, usually in the region of £500 to £1,000.
The donations are of interest because the reports consider re zoning votes taken by the council in relation to Cherrywood in south Dublin, which at one stage was the focus of intensive lobbying conducted by Mr Dunlop and others, on behalf of Monarch.
Some of those donations occurred in 1991, the year the payment considered yesterday by the Moriarty tribunal occurred. According to the reports, some councillors received unsolicited donations.
Mr Monahan said people like him were targeted by party fundraisers. "There'd be some of us in the country that would appear to have some wealth," he said. It was hard to resist requests from friends for money when everyone knew you had it. He called the fund-raisers "collection agents".
"They put the thumb on you and say: `You have to contribute. The boss says you have to contribute'." They would say they had been out in Abbeville and `he listed you down'."
Why a senior business figure in what is recognised as a tough business sector should feel pressurised by comments such as these was not clear. Collecting agents, he said, had the "knack" of putting on pressure. They'd say such things as: "Wouldn't you have a worse time if Fine Gael was in government?"
A personal cheque from Mr Monahan and his wife for £25,000 was written out in February 1991 and given to Mr Paul Kavanagh, the former Fianna Fail fundraiser. The cheque was handed to Mr Kavanagh in Mr Monahan's Castleknock home following a meeting some days earlier in Mr Monahan's Harcourt Street offices.
The cheque was made out to Mr Charles Haughey (party leader's account) and endorsed on the back by Mr Haughey. Mr Kavanagh filled in the payee. The cheque was lodged to the party leader's account in AIB, Baggot Street, through which money donated for Fianna Fail was passed by Mr Haughey before being used for personal purposes.
Mr Kavanagh's evidence was that he hadn't remembered the cheque until it was brought to his attention by the tribunal, but that he now clearly remembered receiving it from Mr Monahan for the Brian Lenihan medical fund.
Mr Monahan, for his part, said he thought the money was for Fianna Fail and he had not knowingly made any contribution to the fund for Mr Lenihan. For this reason the matter of advising the tribunal about the payment didn't arise.
Mr Monahan has supplied the tribunal with a list of political donations, and the cheque is for a significantly larger sum than any on the list. Also, it seems this is the only payment from his personal funds. The tribunal found out about the cheque when it was discovered by AIB in its files.
Earlier, Mr Justice Moriarty said the tribunal should complete hearing evidence by early next year. That, of course, depends on whether more cheques turn up.