There wasn't really a single moment in the Morris Tribunal when it became clear that Supt Kevin Lennon and Det Garda Noel McMahon, the two suspended Donegal gardaí found to have orchestrated hoax explosives finds in Donegal a decade ago, were in trouble.
Tribunals don't work like that. There are no Matlock moments. Instead, there is the methodical uncovering, not so much of the truth, but of the lies that hide the truth.
Along the way though, there were a few good laughs.
There was the time McMahon told his wife that black bags stored in his shed contained bombs because he didn't want to offend her by telling her he had accepted a gift of second-hand clothes from his boss.
Or the major explosives find that turned out to be urea, a fertiliser that doesn't explode.
And the charade arrest of Adrienne McGlinchey, when she sat eating mints and reading magazines while McMahon and Lennon pored over the papers, Lennon occasionally banging the table with his fist and shouting to give the impression of a tough interrogation to passers-by.
Lastly, the bizarre spectacle of US police monitoring McGlinchey and her friend Yvonne Devine as the two holidayed in New York in late 1994, financing their trip by dressing as leprechauns and selling plastic bags of Donegal turf marked as "a piece of the old sod" to Irish Americans. This trip was presented to the anti-terrorist Crime and Security branch in Garda headquarters as a fact-finding expedition to purchase arms for the IRA, and Mr Justice Morris found it "disappointing and mystifying" that Crime and Security failed to follow up on this affair. Had they done so, the entire fabrication of McGlinchey's identity as an informer might have been unearthed a decade ago.
And there were more serious moments too, equally startling. Supt Tom Long recounted how, when Sheenagh McMahon blew the whistle on her estranged husband, Det Garda McMahon, in 1999, she was so distrustful of the gardaí in Donegal she wanted to go to Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness instead of the internal inquiry headed by Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty. The Carty inquiry was established to investigate complaints of Garda corruption in Donegal by the McBrearty family, following the death of cattle dealer Richie Barron.
Stories emerged of the physical abuse of Sheenagh McMahon, who had a gun pointed at her by her husband one morning after he overslept and was late for work, and of Garda Séamus Gordon, frozen to the spot as McMahon cocked his pistol repeatedly during a row over who should take credit for an apparent arms find.
Behind all the comic and black moments were two opposing narratives. On the one hand, Adrienne McGlinchey and her tale of how she was terrorised and blackmailed into posing as an IRA informer and grinding home-made explosives in coffee grinders. Against that, McMahon's and Lennon's insistence she was a genuine Provo.
It wasn't a new argument. Gardaí in Buncrana and Letterkenny were divided about McGlinchey's standing since she first came to their attention more than 15 years ago. Detectives in Buncrana voiced their concerns, and tried to obtain search warrants to find out what was going on in her flat, but were rebuffed by senior officers.
When a search was finally carried out, in March 1994, it was because a civilian interfered in the carefully constructed profile of McGlinchey as a terrorist. Mr Justice Morris found that the resulting search was under the control of Supt Lennon. Its purpose was to cover up the truth, that McGlinchey was a pawn used to advance the careers of Lennon and McMahon. So, after incriminating material was removed from the flat, or rearranged in less incriminating locations, an "official" search was conducted, seven hours after the initial report by a landlord of suspicious items he found under the bath when he called to repair a leak.
The landlord's involvement, and the need to protect McGlinchey from other detectives, meant McGlinchey was brought to Burnfoot when she was arrested, rather than to Buncrana garda station, just hundreds of yards from her home, and that the charade interrogation took place the next day.
"There was a gay frivolity about the whole thing; it was surreal," was the summation of Garda Christy Galligan, a Burnfoot officer who visited the interview room when McGlinchey said she wanted to make a complaint about Lennon's "mannerisms."
By that time McGlinchey had been involved with Lennon and McMahon for almost three years, ever since her first arrest on July 8th, 1991. In her own words, she was "in the wrong place at the wrong time", coming from an area where a well-known Letterkenny republican lived, in the company of Yvonne Devine, 10 years her junior and niece of notorious IRA man Pearse McAuley, currently serving a sentence for his part in the 1996 killing of Det Garda Jerry McCabe. Gardaí had that morning discovered a van packed with explosives in Donegal, and McGlinchey was most likely arrested as part of a fishing expedition by gardaí hoping to find out more.
In custody, she was interviewed by McMahon, then a detective based in Buncrana. On her release, she fell out with her family, possibly over her arrest and the disgrace it had brought on them. Whatever the reason, within days she and Devine moved to Buncrana, where the two camped.
In the years before her arrest, the tribunal heard McGlinchey supplied information to detectives Bobby Mullally, and later to Hugh Smith and Matt Tolan in Letterkenny. This information, the tribunal concluded, consisted of "small snippets of gossip", and whatever tall stories she could fabricate. It was submitted by the detectives to Crime and Security on confidential C77 forms used to record subversive intelligence.
The detectives say they met McGlinchey in empty car-parks in Letterkenny, or would drive around Donegal while she, sometimes reluctantly, gave them information. McGlinchey says she chatted openly to gardaí who visited the family restaurant where she worked, passing on gossip about items reported on the news, which she picked up from Northern traders who called to the restaurant.
The tribunal report acknowledges major problems in the handling of informants, among them the way information was recorded on C77s. The names of informants were unknown to Garda headquarters, and McGlinchey disputes that all the information on C77s presented to the tribunal came from her. The information - heard in closed session at the insistence of the Garda Commissioner despite McGlinchey's waiving of any right to confidentiality as an informer - was accepted by the chairman as having come from her as the detectives said. However, he noted that no arrests or arms finds ever came from anything in these C77s.
In Buncrana, McGlinchey began supplying information to McMahon and his partner, Det Garda Danny Kelly, according to McMahon. She maintains that any information she supplied was given to her by McMahon to impress Kelly.
Penniless when she left home to set up camp with Devine, she wrote cheques from a family bank account to support herself, and claims McMahon blackmailed her with threats of prosecution for cheque fraud. On one occasion McMahon had her show a bag of bullets to Kelly, and then told her she would be prosecuted for possession of ammunition on the basis of fingerprints on the bullets. However, Kelly moved off the scene quickly and was replaced - first informally, then formally - by Lennon, who moved to Buncrana on his promotion from traffic sergeant to inspector in March 1992.
In McGlinchey, the two had found "an almost unique opportunity to engage in a series of acts designed to further their careers", as was stated in Thursday's interim report of the Morris Tribunal. McGlinchey was never an IRA member or genuine informer, merely "a mischievous young woman", anxious to portray herself to gardaí as an informer for reasons unknown, MrJustice Morris found. Her manipulation evolved subtly over time, aided by her own willing participation. By the time of the bogus arrest and interrogation in March 1994, she had transported ammunition over the border under the direction of Lennon, who was then supervising her handling as an informer by McMahon. She had helped the two detectives plant a fake explosives find outside Donegal town, and carried bags to the border at Bridgend where they were dumped near a checkpoint.
She engaged in bizarre activities around Buncrana, ducking and diving when she saw Garda cars, or dropping bags containing paramilitary paraphernalia before running away, with the result that a profile was built up in Garda records of someone genuinely associated with the IRA.
When junior detectives expressed concerns, they were reminded of the so-called "hands off" policy of the then Chief Supt Sean Ginty, whereby only McMahon and Lennon had contact with her. Other explosives finds followed in June and July of 1994, before the IRA ceasefire put an end to the bogus discoveries.
On February 7th, 1997, Lennon was promoted to superintendent. One witness told the tribunal that he was a potential future commissioner. Had Sheenagh McMahon's marriage not broken up, he might today be in charge of the Crime and Security branch he seems to have so skilfully deluded.