It should be shut down. It should be shut down now. There is no appetite for it, no real interest in it. We cannot afford it in financial terms and we can no longer afford the virtual paralysis of affairs of state it has visited on us. We bitch and moan about the Dail only sitting for 70 days of the year or whatever. But the fact that much of that 70 days is spent with the same old tired people rehearsing the same old tired arguments about the minutiae of Bertie Ahern's financial affairs is the real scandal.

This country is facing one of the biggest economic challenges of modern times and we are fiddling while our livelihoods, the value of our houses, the very basics of being able to provide food and shelter for our families, are in jeopardy. Go and ask anyone on the street what they are concerned about right now and you'll find out pretty quickly it's not Bertie Ahern's finances but their own.

But somehow the media and the opposition believe we can afford the luxury of having the majority of political and media energy of this country expended on hounding Bertie Ahern. Clearly in their lofty perches they don't worry about things as prosaic as their jobs, their houses or their children's futures. There are standards to be maintained and the world economic meltdown can wait while we pick over whether there might have been an incidence of corruption in Bertie Ahern's career. Which it appears, by the way, there wasn't.

And frankly, people are no longer interested. They no longer turn up even when Bertie Ahern is in the dock down in Dublin Castle. But then, was there ever that much of an appetite for it? As Fine Gael increased their personalised attacks on Ahern they dropped in the polls.

No one knows what Enda Kenny, or anyone else in the opposition, thinks we should do about the current economic stormclouds. All we really know about Enda Kenny any more is that he thinks Bertie Ahern should resign, or words to that effect. And even at that, with Bertie Ahern being dragged through the mud on an almost daily basis, and with Enda Kenny having set himself up as the anti-Bertie, the voters are still deserting Kenny. Kenny is, in fact, a lame duck leader of the opposition, stalled in pursuing an obsession when everyone else has moved on to more pressing concerns.

Similarly, the Daily Mail, the newspaper that has been at the forefront of the campaign against Bertie Ahern, is read by just three per cent of the adult population of the country. It has roughly the same readership as Image magazine. More people read the Farmer's Journal than read the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail has very clearly identified itself as anti-Bertie. It is their big unique selling point, their big gamble to gain a foothold in the Irish market. And the people have voted with their feet. A little over 100,000 of us read it. There is no appetite for it.

Fine Gael and the Daily Mail have tried to curry favour with middle Ireland by kicking Bertie Ahern when he is down. But the gamble didn't pay off, because Middle Ireland has roundly rejected them and this tribunal. This modest paper you are holding now, just to put things in perspective, is read by ten times as many people as the Daily Mail.

Most ordinary people these days, when pressed for an opinion on the Bertie Ahern affair, will quite simply tell you they are sick of it. They will have varying degrees of disillusionment, or not, with Bertie Ahern and/or the tribunal, but the one thing they will admit is that they are sick of it all. But no one in the media, the tribunal or the opposition can afford to admit this to themselves, to their bosses or to anyone else.

You know why? Because most of them have nothing else. As much as the Bertie industry hasn't paid off for anyone, and has backfired spectacularly on the likes of the Daily Mail, if and when this bout of madness ends, many of the people involved in it stand to lose status, money, work and relevance.

There are journalists and politicians who were never really heard of before and who will never really be heard of again after this is over, but who have garnered some mini-celebrity for the duration. They're certainly not going to let their notoriety go by admitting that no one cares anymore.

And then there are the lawyers who are getting what every worker dreams of -- guaranteed and regular work at the kind of premium rates you get for one-off irregular jobs.

And there is an opposition that has nothing of interest to say about anything except Bertie Ahern. And all of them conspire with various other agendas to keep the circus going. They are acting entirely in their own self-interest but they use their voices to keep insisting this is all in the public interest. Even though the public isn't interested.

The country at large did for a time fall for this obsessional stalking. And while it was fun for a while, there are more pressing adult, real-world matters to be dealt with now. We want our Taoiseach back, our Dail back, our media back, we even want our opposition back. As someone with a touch of Blueshirt blood in me, it disappoints me to see what this noble party has become.

But still some people's self-interested obsessional stalking has come to dominate political discourse in this country. It has become, against the will of the people, the only game in town, foisted on us day in day out. Are we really going to let it continue?

Waste like this is the last thing this country can afford right now. To be spending 350 million quid, and the time and energy of virtually every politician in this country, to be examining and discussing any allegation made by any crank, is wildly irresponsible, unfair and unreasonable. It is also a madness that we should now stop.

And this mental illness is spreading all the time. Take John Cregan TD's letter in the Irish Times last week, in which he pointed out that in one single day of tribunal coverage recently "no fewer than 18 journalists (11 RTE journalists and broadcasters, seven additional journalists from other publications), a public relations expert, a barrister and two actors were used to reflect and parse and analyse the issue for the entire day". That is probably nearly as many as members of the public who turned up to see Bertie the last time he appeared at the tribunal. It is not only wildly out of touch with real people, it is an extraordinary waste of resources, and, in some cases, even of talent.

Put simply, vast tracts of our political and media establishment have lost touch with reality. Deluded, obsessed, mad people have led us down a cul de sac when most of us who live in the real world are just trying to get out of the woods. It is time now to stop indulging this madness. Our government should be in a war room distracted by nothing else while it figures out how to save our economic hide. Instead everything else, has all been put on hold for the lunacy that is this tribunal.

Mahon has had 10 years to find some real dirt on Bertie Ahern. And by the way, don't buy the lie that the reason the tribunal has gone on for 10 years is because Bertie has obstructed it -- that's plain rubbish. We've seen what the tribunal has been up to and it hasn't been waiting for 10 years for Bertie Ahern.

I'll bet if you gave me 10 years, a load of lawyers and staff and 350 million quid, I could find dirt on anyone. I would nearly bet you I could find that any citizen you picked out had done something corrupt. Yet this tribunal, in a whole decade of "urgency", has found no evidence of corruption against Bertie Ahern.

It's time to cut our losses, walk away, hand over the masses of findings to some smart country solicitor, ask him to take a few weeks to pore over them and give us a one page document answering the question: Was Bertie Ahern corrupt?

If Bertie Ahern had been accused of murdering his wife it would have been sorted out in two weeks in the High Court. It has now taken a decade of poring over every aspect of his life to come up with precisely nothing. And the cost has been enormous. Indeed the cost has been far, far greater than the potential cost of any slight corruption that may or may not have happened a decade ago.

We have seen the greatest minds of our generation destroyed by madness and we have seen the greatest politician of our generation and his government rendered impotent by that madness at the very time we need them most. Mark my words, we are only beginning to count the cost of this madness.

The way forward now is clear. We should quite simply tell Mahon that we have no more time, that we are confident he's not going to find out anything else startling by stringing this out for a few more months. We should tell him he's had his chance -- 10 years of it -- and that we want a report. The Government mightn't have the balls to tell him this, but it is now a matter of grave urgency that we move on and face reality. We have played around with this bullshit for long enough. It's time to grow up.

- BRENDAN O'CONNOR