It’s all in the excruciating detail

Sitting through seven hours of testimony can prove less than riveting, Political Editor Harry McGee discovers.

BERTIE Ahern’s much-trumpeted appearance at the Mahon Tribunal yesterday brought a whole new layer of meaning to the notion of anticlimax.

It was like turning up to see a boxing match and mistakenly finding yourself hemmed in at a chess match from which there is no escape. Not even a good chess match. A tedious dour away fixture of a chess match in November that takes more than seven hours to grind to an inevitable stalemate.