I KNOW you are all fed up reading about Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern's convoluted personal finances. You won't get any sympathy from me, however, because you're not half as fed up as I am writing about them. But like it or not, there's no escaping a return to the subject for both of us this week because it appears that the tipping point for the taoiseach has now been reached.

So back we go to the tribunal of enquiry into possible kickbacks to politicians from developers which has now been running for an incredible 10 years and has yet to prove anything against Ahern or anyone else now in the Dail (Parliament).

In fact the tipping point came about 10 days ago, although at first the full impact was not appreciated. Up before the tribunal giving evidence was a young woman called Grainne Carruth, who in 1994 was an office assistant in St. Luke's, Ahern's local constituency office in Drumcondra on the northside of Dublin.

Under great pressure giving her evidence and being questioned about it, she broke down in tears, sobbed that she just wanted to go home, and finally admitted that several lodgments she had made for Ahern into a building society probably were in sterling.

The lodgments in question went into three accounts, one in Ahern's name and two others in his daughters' names. The total involved was relatively small, 15,000 sterling.

But the significance was that Ahern had told the tribunal just a month ago that the lodgments into the accounts were from his salary as a minister at the time. So unless the Department of Finance had been paying Irish ministers with British pounds, this just did not add up.

It was not the contradiction that did the damage, however. What did the damage was the sad spectacle of a very lowly paid secretary being reduced to tears because of Ahern's sloppy personal finances.

Her desperate attempt to be loyal to him, even though she left the job over 10 years ago, was heartbreaking. That's what really stuck in people's throats here and made a lot of people around the country internally shout enough!

Her visibly upset face was on the front page of every newspaper and at the top of the TV news. It did not seem fair. It was like she had been thrown to the wolves by a taoiseach who did not care.

This was not the case at all, of course. It was the tribunal that had called her to give evidence, and it was the tribunal lawyers who had browbeaten her until she cracked and shifted from "I can't remember" to "it must have been sterling."

There was no denying it at that stage anyway, because the building society records for its sterling intake on the day in question showed that the money had to have been sterling.

But even though it was not really Ahern's fault that she had been treated in such a harsh way, the forlorn figure she cut captured the country's heart, and suddenly the taoiseach was the Bad Guy. You could almost see the scales of public opinion in the country slowly swinging across the central point to the negative side.

This comes just a month or so after the tribunal uncovered that 30,000 punt loan paid to Ahern's former partner Celia Larkin out of his Fianna Fail constituency account. Larkin received the loan in 1993 from the mysterious "B/T account" to help her buy the house her elderly aunts were renting.

Ahern says that he knew nothing about that at the time, and anyway it was a private matter arranged to help two elderly ladies who were in fear of being evicted. The loan was only paid back earlier this year after the tribunal began to query it.

On the face of it, that seemed to be something people could accept and fitted with Ahern's caring personality. But given Larkin's glamorous image and lifestyle there was also something about it that did not feel quite right, including the fact that the "loan" was not paid back until a couple of months ago.

There was also a lot of suspicion about this B/T account, which was supposedly set up as a maintenance fund to look after St. Luke's, the small house in Drumcondra which serves as Ahern's constituency office and is the property of a party trust. If that was the case and it was Fianna Fail party money, why was it being used in this way?

The 30,000 loan to Larkin for her aunts raised eyebrows a month ago, but at least there was some kind of explanation. No so with the 15,000 sterling contradiction Ahern now faces, and that's what makes this one different.

There seems to be no explanation other than that Ahern either lied to the Tribunal, or made a "mistake." Either way, misleading the tribunal is an extremely serious matter for anyone, taoiseach or not.

All of this comes, as you know only too well, at the end of a long list of curious cash lodgments in various accounts, "dig-outs" from groups of friends and so on, all of which happened around the early 1990s and which Ahern says were to help him get out of a tight financial situation following his marriage break-up.

And all of this has been uncovered because the tribunal is trawling through the taoiseach's entire financial records over the years to satisfy itself that he did not get any money from developers. The tribunal says it must do this because of an allegation made by one developer that another developer gave Ahern around 80,000 punts at the time, something which Ahern and the alleged donor have strenuously denied and which there is not a shred of evidence to support.

There is still a certain sympathy out there for Ahern. Few of us could withstand such a lengthy trawl through our personal finances and not have a few questions to answer.

Ahern's modest lifestyle is a clear indication that he is not corrupt. And in spite of the attempt to bundle everything unexplained together and label it suspicious or even corrupt, the whole thing still amounts to chickenfeed.

All together it comes to a bit over 200,000 punts, or about one-fifth of the annual earnings of just one of the army of lawyers who have had their noses in the tribunal trough for the past 10 years.

I think it would be fair to say at this stage that, while there is still that sympathy for Ahern, people here have now run out of patience with him and his messy personal finances. They want him gone, ASAP.

His chosen successor Brian Cowen is ready and waiting. As I said in this column before, Ahern is a dead man walking. But he refuses to be pushed.

Both his coalition partners the Greens and the Progressive Democrats have called on him publicly to explain the sterling contradiction and, as Mary Harney put it, "quell the public disquiet" on the issue. So this promises to be an interesting week in the Dail.

The general view here is that Ahern will go soon after his historic address to the U.S. Congress in a few weeks. But don't put any money on it.

Cowen knows that Fianna Fail is going to take a hammering at the local elections in 2009 whoever is in charge, so why not leave Ahern there until then so he can take the blame? I think Ahern will be there until then ... and maybe even longer!

And as for the tribunal "revelations," unless you're one of the more hysterical readers of The Irish Times, they don't reveal any more than that Ahern was unbelievably sloppy and was probably taking dig-outs and presents on a small scale that he should not have been taking. It's chickenfeed.

Even so, he's passed the tipping point, thanks to a young woman's tears. Tribunal fatigue, embarrassment and a loss of patience on the part of the public has finally caught up with him.

And it's the loss of patience by the public that's the killer. It's like having a kid who keeps getting in trouble and turning up in front of you with a guilty face.

Eventually you say right, that's it, you're not playing that game anymore. For Ahern the game is up.