Twelve years ago, when writing The Destruction of Dublin, I chose to describe Des Traynor as Charles J. Haughey's "bagman". The publishers' lawyers would have none of it, so in the book he was merely referred to as Haughey's "close personal friend and financial adviser".

We know now, as a result of evidence given to the Dunnes Payments Tribunal, that Traynor was, indeed, the former Taoiseach's bagman, assiduously raising money on Haughey's behalf to sustain his lavish lifestyle and generally running his financial affairs for more than 30 years.

Haughey was a rich man long before Ben Dunne gave him £1.3 million. Although his first home, after marrying Maureen Lemass in 1954, was a modest semi-detached house in Santry, Dublin, he was in a position to acquire Abbeville, a Georgian mansion on 250 acres of land in Kinsealy, just 15 years later.

In between, there was Grangemore in Raheny, a Victorian house on 45 acres, which Haughey sold to the Gallagher Group in 1969 for more than the £204,000 he paid for his Kinsealy estate in the same year. The house was demolished, of course, and the land developed for suburban housing.

Although Haughey counted Matt Gallagher, and later his son Patrick, among his friends, he was more closely involved with John Byrne, a multi-millionaire Kerry-born property developer who built O'Connell Bridge House, D'Olier House, Parnell House and another office block on Townsend Street.

Des Traynor was a director, for 30 years, of Byrne's two principal companies, Carlisle Trust and Dublin City Estates, and may well have been representing Haughey's interests. Certainly, there are few worldly-wise property people in Dublin who do not believe that Haughey was Byrne's secret partner.

As previously reported in these pages and in The Destruction of Dublin, the Byrne property empire has its headquarters in the Cayman Islands, where its affairs were looked after for many years by the now famous Guinness and Mahon Cayman Trust, which Traynor chaired and John Furze managed.

Byrne never encountered any problem in filling his office blocks with State tenants - at least until 1978 when he acquired what was then called Sean Lemass House on St Stephen's Green. Naturally, he trawled the State sector looking for prospective tenants, but his efforts came to nothing on that occasion. What happened was that all proposals to lease the building were vetoed by George Colley, then Minister for Finance, because he was convinced that Haughey - who was Minister for Health at the time - had a share in it. Byrne was left with no option but to sell the block, which is now occupied by the Irish Permanent Building Society.

The Kerry-born property developer also has a major interest in Tralee's largest hotel, the Mount Brandon, and benefited enormously from its unexpected designation in 1988 as an urban renewal tax incentive area. Kerry County Council had merely sought designation for the derelict mart site in the heart of Tralee.

In 1990, when Haughey was Taoiseach, Byrne scored again when designation was extended to the former Tara Street baths site in Dublin, which he had been sitting on since the early 1970s. That enabled him to build another large office block, Ashford House, which is let to a number of private sector tenants, including AIB. Years earlier, in 1968, Haughey was rumoured to be involved in the development of Telephone House, an oversized office block on Marlborough Street. Here again, Des Traynor was a director of the property company involved, Marlborough Holdings, which was set up by Ken O'Reilly-Hyland.

For many years, O'Reilly-Hyland headed Fianna Fail's fund-raising committee, until he fell out with Haughey in 1982. As chairman of Burmah-Castrol (Ireland) Ltd, he presided over the Greenmount oil company site in Harold's Cross in the late 1960s when there were plans to develop it for high-rise offices.

In 1972, this four-acre site was sold to Echo Holdings Ltd, whose only directors were Pat O'Connor, Haughey's solicitor, election agent and trusted friend, and his son Michael O'Connor. Two of the 100 £1 shares were subscribed and were assigned to O'Connor's wife, Maureen, and his son, Michael. Echo Holdings obtained planning permission in 1975 for an office development on the site, but never implemented it. In 1982 - the year Allied Irish Banks called in Haughey's £1 million overdraft and he was bailed out by Des Traynor - the site was sold to Dodder Properties for £1.4 million through agents Finnegan Menton.

Prior to that sale, the O'Connors were replaced as directors by two accountants from MS Nominees Ltd, a company associated with Traynor's bank, Guinness and Mahon. One of the other directors of that company was another accountant, Samuel Field-Corbett, who also had close links with Haughey.

Field-Corbett, a partner in Haughey Boland, was a director of the only two companies with which Haughey was publicly associated - Abbeyville Ltd, the vehicle used to buy his Kinsealy estate in 1969, and Larchfield Securities Ltd, which acquired Inishvickillaune on his behalf in 1973.

ANOTHER director of Larchfield was Brendan Hogan, one of the two accountants from MS Nominees who joined the "board" of Echo Holdings after the O'Connors resigned in 1982. (Incidentally, Abbeyville Ltd was liquidated in 1975 by John Stakelum, who would later play a major role in paying Haughey's bills.)

In 1983, Pat O'Connor's law firm emphatically denied that Haughey was the true beneficial owner of the Greenmount site. "Neither Mr Haughey, any member of his family nor any person or body corporate on his behalf have at any time, directly or indirectly, had any interest in Echo Holdings Ltd."

To suggest otherwise, the solicitors said, was to allege that in April 1982, "while holding the office of Taoiseach", Haughey had "engaged in a secret business transaction involving the commercial sale of land and profited from the sale as the alleged beneficial owner". Such allegations were "wholly false". Given that Haughey has admitted telling lies about Ben Dunne's largesse - which is, after all, the only source of underground funding to be disclosed so far - it will clearly take another tribunal to get to the bottom of his financial affairs and, in particular, the origins of his wealth.

Such a tribunal would need to examine Haughey's relationship with John Byrne, with Marlborough Holdings and Echo Holdings, as well as looking into other deals done while he was Taoiseach - such as the exercise of force majeure in requiring UCD to relieve Pino Harris of the Carysfort site in Blackrock.

The link with John Byrne should also embrace Endcamp Ltd, the vehicle he used in an effort to realise the development potential of some 400 acres of land along Baldoyle Estuary in the early 1980s. That housing scheme included a sewerage system which could have opened up the entire north fringe of Dublin - including Kinsealy.

Haughey's relationship with Patrick Gallagher, who served a prison sentence in Northern Ireland after being convicted of fraud, would also bear further examination. It should not be forgotten that Gallagher was hailed as "the man with the Midas touch" before his property empire collapsed like a house of cards in 1982. The Labour Party leader, Dick Spring, claimed on Wednesday that Haughey owed £20,000 to Merchant Banking Ltd, the Gallagher "bank" which went into liquidation with a mountain of debts. In fact, the loan sums involved were £6,541 to Haughey and £11,836 to Larchfield Securities, both of which were paid off. Any new tribunal would also have to take into account that neither his Kinsealy estate nor Inishvickillaune was ever mortgaged as security for borrowings to sustain a lifestyle which was costing at least £25,000 a month to maintain, according to evidence presented to the Dunnes Payments Tribunal.

At that extravagant rate of expenditure, even Ben Dunne's £1.3 million would have lasted only just over four years. Where did all the rest of the money come from over the 34 years during which the former Taoiseach's financial affairs were managed by that man of few words, the late Des Traynor?