In the midst of his ordeal at the Flood tribunal, Liam Lawlor must have taken some comfort from the news that the National Library had forked out $1.4 million for a manuscript of part of James Joyce's Ulysses.
With the market for first drafts of great works of Irish fiction so buoyant, his own affidavit to the tribunal and the fake invoices he admitted issuing for "political contributions" must be worth a great deal.
And if the worst comes to the worst and Mr Justice Flood follows through on his dark warnings and the courts dispatch Mr Lawlor to jail, his prison diaries would be of great interest to publishers and libraries.
It is a tribute to the work of the tribunal team, however, that in spite of Liam Lawlor's obfuscations, evasions and pointblank refusals to answer questions, it has already uncovered what may prove to be immensely significant information. It has long been clear that the Dublin West TD is a key figure in the web of connections between Fianna Fail and a range of business interests.
The tribunal has grasped the fact that to focus narrowly on his involvement in the planning scandals would be to miss his real significance. Thus its insistence on looking at companies with no ostensible involvement in planning matters. Thus, too, the vehemence of Liam Lawlor's insistence that it should stick to a narrow interpretation of its remit.
Payments to him by Frank Dunlop turn up in Lawlor's Prague-based operations. The invoices Lawlor sent to Tom Roche of National Toll Roads were from a company ostensibly set up to provide advice on cold storage in Nigeria.
At the same time, Liam Lawlor's role in the planning process in Dublin cannot be properly understood without having a wider sense of the part he played in a much bigger nexus of political and business interests.
If he were merely what he appeared to be - a backbench TD and local councillor - Lawlor could hardly have been so influential that big business interests were queuing up to fill his bewildering array of bank accounts with "political contributions".
It is in this context that the tribunal's probing of accounts held by a Lawlor company called Advanced Proteins is so potentially significant.
That this company, which never traded, had £900,000 in its bank accounts is rather interesting. That much of this money, according to Lawlor, came from Goodman International is even more intriguing. That the largest of these payments were made in late 1987 and early 1988 is fascinating. For this was precisely the time when the extraordinary relationship between Goodman International and a minority Fianna Fail administration headed by Charles Haughey was at its most intense.
According to Liam Lawlor's evidence, at least £365,000 in the Advanced Proteins accounts came from Goodman International.
The money, he said, was to fund an "ongoing feasibility study" on the manufacture of proteins from Larry Goodman's meat plants. The study was unproductive and some of the funds were transferred back to Goodman International.
Oddly, however, there is a large gap of about £160,000 between the money Goodman put into the account and what was given back.
Oddly, too, at least one payment of £50,000 was made by Goodman two months after the study was apparently abandoned. These apparent discrepancies may be explained away when Liam Lawlor finally gives full and frank evidence, but as things stand it seems that very large amounts of Goodman money stayed in Liam Lawlor's accounts.
As it happens, we know a great deal about Larry Goodman at this time and about his relationship to the Fianna Fail government of the day. He told the beef tribunal that access to Ministers gave him a commercial advantage over rival companies and that he had no compunction about using it: "I did have access, and I did use it to the best of advantage for my company any time I could."
His direct access to Charles Haughey and the then Minister for Industry and Commerce Albert Reynolds certainly resulted in substantial advantages.
Goodman was chosen as the vehicle for the IDA-funded master plan for the development of the beef industry. He also got the Government to back Goodman International's huge and extremely risky deals with Iraq with funds. Liam Lawlor took a direct hand in this latter affair, at one stage early in 1989 taking part in meetings between the Iraqi government and Goodman International in Baghdad.
We also know that Larry Goodman saw nothing wrong with the intertwining of business and political contacts. While, as we now know, he was involved in a putative business venture with Liam Lawlor, he was also, at the same time, discussing with C&D Foods (owned by Albert Reynolds) a possible joint venture with them. Goodman had an investment vehicle called the Food Venture Fund (FVF). Before a key meeting with Reynolds on government business in 1987, he was briefed on the "position on C&D and FVF," according to a Goodman document disclosed at the beef tribunal.
It should be stressed that Albert Reynolds told the beef tribunal that he had no involvement in these negotiations with Goodman's fund and that "nothing came of it".
There is no suggestion that his actions as Minister were in any way influenced by the exploration of business links with Goodman. What is interesting, though, is that Goodman was at the same time considering a similar kind of joint venture with Lawlor.
The big Goodman payments into Advanced Proteins - £250,000 in September 1987 and £65,000 the following month - happen to coincide with the key decisions by the Fianna Fail administration in relation to Goodman and Iraq. It was exactly at this time that the Government committed itself to bearing the risks of a huge $135 million Goodman contract with Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad.
Pending the outcome of future court cases, the consequences of that decision could still come back to haunt the taxpayer. In the meantime, the need to look again at that strange saga is becoming ever more obvious.
fotoole@irish-times.ie
