Inside Politics Stephen CollinsThe political world has been jolted by the disclosure that the Mahon tribunal is investigating payments made to the Taoiseach when he was minister for finance in 1993.
Politicians of all parties are this weekend desperately trying to assess the potential for good or ill, arising from the revelations in Thursday's Irish Times.
The Taoiseach's annoyance was all too clear at his press conference in Government Buildings yesterday.
Mr Ahern's curt statement about the affair and his uncharacteristic refusal to take any questions was an indication of just how seriously he is taking the matter. Conversely, the Opposition took the Taoiseach's response as confirmation that he is hurting and that the potential to inflict political damage is huge. In the immediate aftermath of the publication of The Irish Times report both the Taoiseach and the Opposition appeared to regard it as another routine tribunal story that would blow over in a day or two.
During his constituency tour of Clare, Mr Ahern made no bones about responding to the report in an interview with Clare FM and later in the day he gave an even more detailed reaction at a press conference.
In both interviews he accepted the accuracy of The Irish Times report that he had received money from business people to help him with the legal costs of his separation in 1993 but he maintained that the total sum involved was not nearly as large as the €50,000 to €100,000 mentioned. It was only after these two interviews that the Opposition parties appeared to wake up to the political potential of the issue.
Labour's Joan Burton was first into the fray with a strong statement demanding that the Taoiseach say precisely how much was involved. She also made the direct political point that Michael Lowry had been forced to resign as a government minister in 1996 for the precise transgression of accepting a large gift from a prominent businessman.
Initially Fine Gael reacted much more cautiously to the affair and only came up with a response on Thursday evening after Labour and the Greens had made the running. Party frontbencher Fergus O'Dowd quoted remarks made by the Taoiseach on earlier occasions about the inappropriateness of politicians accepting money from businessmen.
The point was reinforced in a television interview by party leader Enda Kenny later that evening.
The paradox of the affair is that it has erupted after politicians of all parties had dismissed the potential of the tribunals to cause them harm. Blank cheques, the evidence of Tom Gilmartin, the disgrace of a former taoiseach and senior ministers have had little or no impact on the fortunes of the current Government or the Opposition parties.
While the resignation of Ray Burke in the autumn of 1997 and his subsequent disgrace encouraged the Opposition to believe that the tribunals would ultimately destroy the Fianna Fáil-PD coalition, nothing of the kind happened. A succession of prominent Fianna Fáil figures, Charles Haughey, Ray Burke, Pádraig Flynn and Liam Lawlor, chief among them, suffered shame and disgrace, while Mr Ahern, himself, had to account for the embarrassing episode of the blank cheques.
Yet when the 2002 election campaign got under way it became apparent that the political impact of all the tribunal revelations was precisely zero. Riding the crest of the economic wave, Bertie Ahern almost pulled off an overall majority for Fianna Fáil and only failed to do so because of Michael McDowell's famous "One-party government: No thanks" intervention.
After 2002 the Opposition focused its attack on the claim that the Coalition had misled the electorate during the election campaign. This strategy struck a chord with the voters and while they didn't take to the streets as happened in Hungary over the past week they gave the Government a bloody nose in the 2004 local and European elections. It became an accepted fact of political life that tribunals did not have the capacity to influence events one way or another. Then in the past few days that particular truism evaporated. Whatever has gone on in the Mahon tribunal in relation to the Taoiseach's personal finances is now a central political issue.
The key issue is whether the question of who paid money to Mr Ahern during his separation proceedings is a personal, private matter, or whether he should have to account publicly for the money he received from rich friends for his personal benefit.
The political battle over the next week or so will be to establish which of these positions is the most widely accepted by the public.