Liam Lawlor is so devoted to golf that, according to his 1999 declaration of interests, he raised £7,600 from a single golf classic. Yet, however much his handicap is improved by his hard work on the course this week, his achievements in the game are never likely to match his prowess at the one sport in which he is undoubtedly world class: sailing close to the wind.

For many years now, he has amazed onlookers with his ability to keep an even keel in the choppiest waters. Even by his own high standards, his latest manoeuvre is breathtaking.

The personal legal consequences of his refusal to appear on Tuesday will be a matter for the Director of Public Prosecutions, to whom Mr Justice Flood has referred it. But Liam Lawlor's defiance of the tribunal has other dimensions. In party political terms, his semi-detached relationship with Fianna Fail since he resigned after the party's internal inquiry has been replaced by one to which the words "forty-foot" and "bargepole" might apply.

On Thursday, Bertie Ahern told the Dail with a resounding finality that "Deputy Liam Lawlor is not a deputy of my party now." Yesterday, the Fianna Fail press office was very happy to confirm that the Dublin West TD had resigned, not just from the parliamentary party, but from the national organisation as well. After this week, it seems clear that there is no way back into the fold for a man who was once at the centre of an extraordinary web of connections.

Beyond the narrow confines of party politics, though, there is the fact that Liam Lawlor has come to sum up a sense of arrogance and impunity that threatens public confidence in the entire political process. His behaviour in defying an inquiry which he himself voted to establish dramatises in a most vivid way the feeling that those who make the law sometimes consider themselves to be above it. And the fact that the Dail itself can do little other than issue a broad statement of concern highlights yet again the extreme weakness of its sanctions against errant members.

In the media blitz which he undertook on Tuesday and Wednesday, Liam Lawlor presented himself, essentially, as an ordinary citizen fighting off the oppressive demands of a latterday Irish version of the Star Chamber or the Spanish Inquisition. Central to his claims is the notion that the relative rights of the tribunal and of a witness called before it are still somehow unclear. In his view, all that will happen on Monday when he is called before the High Court is that the court will clarify the law and allow him to proceed with his evidence on a proper basis: "The High Court will give its judgment and set down the guidelines and I can appear before the tribunal."

The reality, as he must know, is that those guidelines have been set down a long time ago and that the issues at stake between himself and the Flood tribunal have already been decided. Since most of the tribunals of the 1990s had their powers challenged in one way or another, there is no shortage of High Court and Supreme Court rulings defining the limits of those powers. The courts have been absolutely clear and consistent in finding that the limits are quite broad.

In 1991, for example, Goodman International and Larry Goodman challenged the operation of the beef tribunal. Both the High Court and Supreme Court dismissed the challenge, principally on the ground that a tribunal is not a court of law and does not therefore have to follow the procedures of a criminal trial.

A tribunal, like any other investigating body, has to follow the rules for fair procedures laid down by the Supreme Court in 1971, in a case taken by Charles Haughey's brother Jock. But it is not bound by, for example, the rules of evidence that apply in court. This judgment is so clear that it is very hard to see any basis for Liam Lawlor's insistence that a tribunal must behave, in every important respect, like a criminal court.

The other key issue on which he has sought to justify his defiance of the tribunal is the claim that Mr Justice Flood has no right to investigate his private or business affairs. Again, though, the courts have dismissed such claims before. Dealing with a challenge to the Moriarty tribunal by Charles Haughey in 1998, the Supreme Court stressed that a tribunal of inquiry could be established only to deal with "matters of vital public importance concerning which there is something in the nature of a nationwide crisis of confidence".

The view which the courts have invariably taken is that precisely because a tribunal is, by definition, investigating something extraordinary, the public interest in allowing it to get at the facts is so high that it outweighs a citizen's rights to privacy or confidentiality.

In the Haughey case, the Supreme Court accepted that individuals have a constitutional right to privacy. But so long as the matters being investigated are relevant to the tribunal's inquiries, and so long as the private matters being looked into have "a public connotation as well", the tribunal can't be blocked merely by claiming that the information is private. Within those rules, as Mr Justice Hederman put it in the Supreme Court, "it would be very unwise for this court to attempt to fetter the discretion which the tribunal undoubtedly possesses to regulate its own procedure".

The only possible ground on which Liam Lawlor can perhaps claim to be raising a real issue that has not been definitively dealt with by the courts is that of the bank documents, which, according to the tribunal, he has failed to supply.

In the Haughey case, where the same issue was debated, the Supreme Court declined to rule definitively on whether the constitutional right to privacy extends to bank records. It was prepared to accept, purely for the sake of argument, that "the constitutional right to privacy extends to the privacy and confidentiality of a citizen's banking records and transactions". But it found that, even if it did, it could be overridden by the tribunal's need to investigate matters of vital public importance.

The theoretical issue of whether bank accounts normally enjoy constitutional protection is, in other words, beside the point. If a tribunal thinks the accounts are relevant to its inquiries and may contain information that has public connotations, then it can look at them.

The only good argument that Liam Lawlor seems to have on his side is one which, oddly enough, he declined to use this week. In reply to the insistence of the Taoiseach and the other party leaders that those who help to establish tribunals should not attempt to obstruct them, he might well have pointed out to Mr Ahern that a Government in which he was a senior figure successfully scuppered a key part of the beef tribunal's investigations by invoking cabinet confidentiality to prevent ministers from answering certain questions.

When he eventually does appear before Mr Justice Flood, some of his former colleagues may well hope that Liam Lawlor's residual reluctance to embarrass his former colleagues is still intact.

fotoole@irish-times.ie