Liam Lawlor: Liam Lawlor, who has died in a car accident in Moscow, was the first and so far the only sitting TD to be jailed arising from the investigations of the tribunals into corruption.
Although he was sent to Mountjoy Prison three times for failing to co-operate with the planning tribunal, Lawlor was never convicted of a criminal offence. Neither did he figure in any of the four interim reports published by the tribunal so far, though most observers would attribute this to the former west Dublin TD's success in staving off the lawyers' inquiries. The final tribunal report is unlikely to treat him as benignly as a 1989 Garda investigation, which concluded he emerged "with his reputation unscathed".
Lawlor was an ebullient character - "larger than life" in the posthumous assessment of the Taoiseach and former tribunal chairman Justice Feargus Flood - with an expensive lifestyle and a bullying temperament.
What Ray Burke was to north Dublin, Liam Lawlor was to the west of the city, a big-budget, parish-pump Fianna Fáil TD with his ear to the ground and cosy relations with local businessmen. The whiff of intrigue hung about both men throughout their political careers, but both perfected the art of deflecting awkward questions with impenetrable silence or bouts of verbal aggression.
Although born in Dublin, Lawlor's roots were in Co Laois, as were those of his long-time business partner Jim Kennedy. His father was also friendly with Tom Roche of National Toll Roads, who was to make large payments to the TD during his career.
He studied engineering at Bolton Street and married a fellow student, Hazel Barber, whose father ran a refrigeration company.
After his apprenticeship Lawlor went into the same business. With a £200 van, he drove around the country servicing refrigeration plants and then moved into the design of computer rooms. Business prospered during the economic boom that followed Ireland's entry into the Common Market, and the youthful entrepreneur was soon employing several hundred workers.
Already his thoughts were turning to politics. A member of Fianna Fáil since he was 16, he stood for a seat on Dublin County Council in 1974 but was beaten by Brian Lenihan. It was to be the start of a long-running political rivalry between Lawlor and the Lenihan family.
His misfortune was to share a constituency for so long with the most popular politician in Fianna Fáil.
In 1977, at the age of 33, he swept into the Dáil in the party's landslide election under Jack Lynch. A council seat followed two years later. A bright future in politics appeared to beckon, and he sold off his refrigeration business in the early 1980s.
With his sharp suits, his big cars and his Georgian mansion in Lucan, Lawlor acquired the reputation of a "poor man's Haughey". But in spite of assiduous constituency work, he never found the business of garnering votes easy. Money compensated for his lack of popularity; the size of Lawlor's election campaigns was legendary.
His posters and leaflets were always bigger and better than anyone else's and highly personalised. He would deliver bags of coal to constituents at election time, but take them back if he discovered opposition supporters in the house.
The refrigeration business put him in contact with Larry Goodman, then on his way to becoming Ireland's biggest and most controversial beef baron. Lawlor was a stalwart in Goodman's battle with Killeshandra Co-op for control of Bailieboro Co-op, and organised the canvass of shareholders that swung the battle in Goodman's favour.
In 1987 he was rewarded with a seat on the board of Goodman's company, Food Industries. Two years later, amid allegations of a conflict of interest, he had to resign from an Oireachtas committee that was investigating a business deal in which the company was involved. Only as a result of the tribunal did it emerge that the beef baron had paid over £300,000 at this time to Lawlor to fund a land purchase in Lucan. Goodman struggled to recover his money, and the two men fell out.
Politically, too, Lawlor was courting the wealthy. He drove Charles Haughey around the "chicken and chips circuit" of rural Fianna Fáil cumainn when the latter was trying to come in from the wilderness. But in 1979 he backed George Colley for the leadership, having heard that Colley would give him a cabinet seat. Haughey won, and never forgave him.
In 1980 Dublin County Council rezoned 150 acres of land in Lucan. This included 20 acres owned by Lawlor, though this only emerged later. In the ensuing controversy, Lawlor claimed he was not present when the vote was taken; he had left just before his party colleagues pushed through the rezoning against the advice of officials.
Haughey forced the council to rescind the decision, the only time during this period that the councillors' rezoning frenzy was stopped in its tracks.
There was more controversy in 1993, when three acres by his house in Lucan were included in the controversial rezoning of Airlie Stud.
He claimed to be unaware of the rezoning until told about it by The Irish Times.
Lawlor knew all the big developers in Dublin and held sway over the council. His support for a rezoning was considered crucial, especially if it was in west Dublin, and landowners flocked to avail of his "consultancy" services.
However, his most enduring partnership was with Kennedy and solicitor John Caldwell. He was a regular visitor to Kennedy's amusement arcade on Westmoreland Street, where the corrupt assistant county manager George Redmond popped in to collect wads of cash.
Kennedy scouted for land that could be rezoned profitably, Lawlor looked after the councillors who would effect the decision, while Caldwell devised complex offshore structures to shelter the resulting profits. Because of the whiff of sulphur about him, Lawlor's involvement was usually hidden, and it was only at the tribunal that the details emerged of at least eight such transactions.
His activities might have been questionable, but his energy was awe-inspiring. The former Dublin hurler and marathon runner was an underwriter for Lloyds for over a decade and was even a member of the Trilateral Commission.
Lawlor's involvement with developer Tom Gilmartin's plan to build shopping centres at Quarryvale and Bachelors Walk proved his unmaking. Gilmartin, who paid the TD over £100,000 in the late 1980s, has claimed Lawlor tried to muscle in on his business projects. The tribunal is still investigating his claim that Lawlor brought him to a meeting with cabinet members in 1989, after which the developer says he was subjected to a demand for a £5 million bribe.
As the tribunal started investigating him, he was forced to bow out of public life; he left Fianna Fáil in 2001 and opted not to stand in the following year's election. When not appearing before the tribunal, he was often seeking business opportunities in eastern Europe. It was one such business deal that led him to Moscow last weekend, where the car in which he was a passenger crashed while on the way from the airport.
Liam Aloysius Lawlor, born October 19th, 1944; died October 22nd, 2005