Bertie and the leaking anorak

Lots of metaphors about Bertie have done the rounds over the past two years. Death by a thousand cuts. Another nail in the coffin. But until now - despite all the talk of running out of track and ends being night - there has been nothing to suggest that he will go much earlier than he had planned.

I think what happened with Grainne Carruth yesterday and today has changed all that. She has moved from a position where she simply cashed Bertie Ahern's salary cheques and lodged occasional amounts into the accounts set up for his two daughters to a position where she fully accepts that she exchanged and lodged £15,500 in sterling for Bertie Ahern. It was, by all accounts, a fraught day for Carruth today - she was being paid only £66 a week when she started working for Bertie but it's clear that she - and everybody else associated with St Luke's for that matter - was fiercely loyal.

But the real focus here is the implications all of this will have for the Taoiseach? in the kindest possible scenario, he has some explaining to do how an account which he said was used for lodging his salary cheques has been shown - and proved beyond reasonable doubt on any fair reading of the transcript - to have also been used to lodge large amounts of sterling. It will be stretching it a bit (to put it mildly) to say that this account gave yet another outing for the famous recyclable sterling that was associated with his house in the Beresford Estate and Michael Wall. But you never know. Truth in the form of Bertie Ahern's evidence has often been much much stranger than fiction.

And back to the metaphors. Another nail in the coffin. Not the final one, said a colleague today. But certainly a six-inch nail that was hammered in so deeply that it'll be nigh impossible to prise out.