The Tribunal Years:Once the tribunal started investigating him, Liam Lawlor's career was over, writes Paul Cullen
Liam Aloysius Lawlor was one of the most energetic, ambitious, greedy and ultimately corrupt politicians Irish public life has seen.
A political bootboy whose word could not be trusted, he could nonetheless be engaging and witty in company. The former west Dublin TD lived life at a frantic pace, forever charging from one business deal or political clinch to another; to the end, he kept his fingers in a bewildering array of commercial enterprises.
In 2001, he became the first politician to be jailed in connection with the tribunals, although his three trips to Mountjoy were the result of obstructionism and obduracy rather than any criminal prosecution. The judge accused him of "blatant defiance" of the planning tribunal, then put it in context: "That he did so as a citizen is a disgrace; that he did so a public representative is a scandal."
Corruption was rife in Dublin local politics long before he joined the county council, but Lawlor took the business of making money out of politics to a new level. In Ray Burke's phrase, his business and political lives - and bank accounts - were "seamless" as he proffered himself as a "consultant" to wealthy business people seeking to have their land rezoned.
A "poor man's Charlie Haughey", he became wealthy early in his career and remained transfixed by bling throughout his life. The period mansion in west Dublin, the chauffeur-driven top-of-the-range Mercedes - "Lord Lucan", as he was nicknamed, never did things in half measures.
But unlike Haughey, his political career was second-division, his legacy negligible. He struggled to hang on to his Dáil seat, losing it twice and scraping home on several occasions. Having fallen out with the Lenihan dynasty - Brian usually shared the constituency - he stood no chance of becoming a minister.
He chaired the odd committee, even sat on the Dáil ethics watchdog, but his main use to the party was as a political rottweiler, sent out to savage opposition politicians. As Haughey once described Lawlor to a woman journalist: "You may not like him, madam, but he gets the job done."
Later, when he came under pressure from the planning tribunal and fell out with Fianna Fáil, his attacks grew nastier and more personal and were as often directed at former party colleagues as at Fine Gael or Labour.
Long before he left Fianna Fáil in 2001, he was a "semi-detached" member of the party, accustomed to the role of the maverick in politics. He operated permanently in denial mode, parrying the various allegations that were directed his way and returning them with gusto. A colleague remarked that he had perfected the art of "hiding in full view".
Once the tribunal started investigating him, however, Lawlor's career was finished. There were too many unexplained payments, too many contradictory explanations. He couldn't decide whether to say the pay-offs he got were consultancy payments - therefore liable to tax - or political contributions, which would beg too many questions.
Even so, he staved off the lawyers for years. He took the tribunal to the High Court and won the first round but hubris led him to think, wrongly, that the inquiry would then back off. It didn't, and the net tightened on Lawlor. We learned about the £4.6 million flowing through his accounts, of which only £2 million was explained. One developer gave him over £40,000 to change the postal address of his development. Frank Dunlop labelled him "Mr Big" in the bribing of councillors to secure the rezoning of Quarryvale.
Lawlor offered outlandish excuses for the payments discovered in the accounts of his many companies. The £350,000 he got from Goodman International was for a blood protein project in Argentina, we were told; it was actually for a land deal, the tribunal discovered a decade later. When National Toll Roads gave him £74,000, he obliged with a fake invoice for a cold store in Nigeria.
Peeling back the layers of his business interests, the tribunal discovered bank accounts in various offshore locations, mysterious trusts and a foundation in Liechtenstein, and a pattern of business dealings that saw Lawlor's involvement in land deals hidden from public view.
Typically, he offered "consultancy" in return for a stake in a business project, such as a rezoning. Nothing was committed to paper in these "gentlemen's agreements" so he was able to deny holding shares in the project. The downside of this was that he found it difficult to force his partners to pay up, and many of his ventures ended in a dispute before the courts.
Born in Dublin in 1944, Lawlor grew up in Crumlin and played hurling for the Dublin minors. He studied engineering in Bolton Street and, like Michael Lowry, went into the refrigeration business.
At 30, he stood unsuccessfully for Fianna Fáil in the local elections. In 1977, however, he was swept into the Dáil as one of the youngest TDs to be elected. His election campaigns were lavish affairs. Around this time he acquired Somerton, an 18th-century mansion in Lucan, together with extensive lands in the area.
In 1980, shortly after being elected to the council, he was immersed in a first serious controversy after councillors rezoned 150 acres of land in Lucan against the advice of officials. Later, it emerged that he owned some of the land, although he had not taken part in the vote.
In the ensuing controversy, Haughey ordered the council to rescind this rezoning, but in the public mind Lawlor's name was already tainted. There was further controversy in 1989, when he was forced to resign as chair of the Oireachtas committee on State-sponsored bodies. At the time, the committee was inquiring into Irish Sugar and Lawlor was a director of Food Industries, the Larry Goodman-controlled company that was attempting to acquire Irish Sugar.
Lawlor was prone to exaggerating or lying about his credentials. In 1989, he travelled on behalf of Goodman to Iraq, where he told officials he was a representative of the Irish government. In Prague in the 1990s, he introduced himself to government ministers as a key "member of the ruling party in Ireland" and handed out business cards that read "Liam A. Lawlor - MP".
Central to his business dealings was a long-time partnership with Jim Kennedy. The tribunal believes the two men were secretly involved in at least eight different land deals around Dublin and that attempts were made to bribe county councillors to get some of these rezoned.
Lawlor vehemently denied the allegation and Kennedy, who lives offshore, is refusing to co-operate with the tribunal. However, the evidence points to their joint involvement in ventures worth millions of euro in west and north Dublin.
By the mid-1990s, Lawlor was in dire financial straits and the banks were threatening to repossess Somerton. As usual, though, he called their bluff, had some of his debts written off and survived unscathed. Irrepressibly, he moved on to new pastures, seeking out business opportunities in the booming cities of eastern Europe and even talking about returning to post-war Iraq.
Between foreign trips, he took to representing himself at the tribunal, proving more than adept at the profession when he wasn't throwing a temper tantrum.
That was the shame about Liam Lawlor, really; so much talent squandered by a lack of patience, a fondness for taking short cuts and an unerring knack for hitting the self-destruct button. His passing leaves Irish life cleaner but undeniably duller.