On Monday last, the judge found him in contempt of court. He had disobeyed a clear order of the High Court. He was hauled off to jail.

But since he wasn't a politician, no one paid very much attention to the case of Maurice Clery, a Co Limerick farmer taken from his home by gardai on Monday morning and sent to Limerick Prison for refusing to obey a court order to hand over land certificates so that his farm could be sold to meet his debts. Though the event was not without drama - it allegedly took gardai 15 to 20 minutes to force their way into his bedroom and overpower him - it couldn't compete with the other contempt of court case that produced a stunning outcome on the same day.

What happened to Maurice Clery is what happens time and again to ordinary citizens who defy the courts. It's what happened to David McMahon, a bricklayer, and William Rogers, a labourer, in 1998 when they refused to stop picketing two Dublin construction sites as part of a dispute involving their trade union. They remained in jail until they purged their contempt.

As in every other such case involving ordinary citizens, the judge was emphatic. He didn't like sending them to prison, but he had no choice in the matter. Jail follows contempt as night follows day.

So why should this week's imprisonment of Liam Lawlor, whose defiance of orders of the High and Supreme Courts has been open, brazen and explicit, come as such a shock? On the one hand, Mr Justice Smyth's resounding ruling gave heart to those who have long despaired of the way things work. On the other, the very fact that the justice system can produce a sensation merely by treating a TD as it would treat anyone else was a mark of how far confidence in Irish democracy has sunk.

Liam Lawlor's imprisonment was sensational only because it comes after years of astonishing impunity for people with the right political and financial connections. Ireland is not significantly more corrupt than most Western democracies. But it is the only one in which scandals have had so few consequences. Like figures from a superhero comic, the system's insiders seem to have been protected by an invisible force-field that preserves them from all real damage.

Attorney General Michael McDowell summed it up in the Dail in September 1994 when he spoke as an Opposition TD in the debate on the report of the beef tribunal. Referring to those responsible for the many gross breaches of the law identified in the report, he asked: "Will any of them spend a night in jail and hang their Armani suit on the back of the cell door in Mountjoy? They will not."

And in all the years since then, as scandal after scandal has emerged, that question has seemed ever more rhetorical. Michael McDowell's explanation for the silence of Fianna Fail in relation to Larry Goodman - "they dare not even rebuke this man because they know in their hearts that he has information on them and that he would bring them down like a group of skittles if the truth ever emerged" - may or may not have had substance. But the feeling that some people could get away with almost anything was undoubtedly enhanced by Charles Haughey's escape from having to face trial for repeatedly misleading the McCracken tribunal.

Ironically, it may be precisely that well justified sense of being untouchable that brought Liam Lawlor to grief. While others had the wit to mask their defiance of the law with a show of deference and the odd moment of apparent humility, all Lawlor was short of was a T-shirt with the slogan "Nyah, Nyah, you can't catch me." He strutted around like a kid making faces at a caged ape in the zoo.

He may have been stupid, but he was not completely mad. He clearly believed that, however much the optics demanded a formal distance between himself and his old colleagues in Fianna Fail, he still had friends in high places. And he was not entirely wrong. The expressions of sympathy this week from Bertie Ahern (who, when he first became party leader, plucked him from the backbenches and appointed him to the Fianna Fail front bench) and from Micheal Martin suggest there is still a strange reluctance to alienate Liam Lawlor.

An analysis by Labour's Eamon Gilmore of Lawlor's Dail voting record, moreover, does seem to indicate some kind of tacit understanding with Fianna Fail. From June 7th last year when he resigned from Fianna Fail, Lawlor failed to support the Government in every one of the 21 Dail divisions held over the following two weeks, abstaining on every vote.

YET, on June 21st, Lawlor suddenly started voting with the Government. Since then, he has turned up to vote with the Government more regularly even than Bertie Ahern. While Dermot Ahern vehemently denied on Prime Time during the week that any deal had been done, these figures and the soft tones of ministers do seem to suggest at least some kind of unspoken arrangement.

When the Mountjoy cell door closed behind Liam Lawlor on Wednesday afternoon, however, the sordid chapter of Irish political history that is made up of such tacit understandings also came to a close. However, just as one swallow doesn't make a summer, one jailbird doesn't make a new springtime for Irish democracy. Ireland still has more untouchables than India. Nevertheless, something fundamental has changed.

Whether or not Liam Lawlor wore Armani into Mountjoy, the fact is that the answer to Michael McDowell's rhetorical question is no longer an automatic No. The smug assumption that People Like Us could never possibly go to jail has been undermined. The belief that you could always fob off a tribunal with amnesia, evasion and a few downright whoppers will no longer be so confidently held.

Last Tuesday morning, Liam Lawlor stood in the queue at a self-service restaurant in Dublin. Oddly intent on drawing attention to himself, he asked out loud: "What will I have for breakfast?"

With one voice, his fellow-citizens gave the answer they had been longing to utter for years: porridge.

fotoole@irish-times.ie