Sudden improvements in memory suggest a miracle amnesia cure

Like many men in love with power, Charles Haughey has long been a great admirer of Napoleon. Whether this biographical tit-bit was on the mind of Mr Justice Thomas Smyth this week when he sent Liam Lawlor back to jail, which is now under appeal, is hard to say.

The judge is known for his careful choice of literary allusions, so when he quoted in his ruling from Honore de Balzac's novel A Murky Business, he may well have had certain parallels in view.

The novel is a political thriller set in the time of Napoleon's megalomaniacal prime. The general has big plans for world domination, but he is beset by conspirators out to depose him. Thankfully, he can call on the services of the loyal Fouche, whose job it is to mind his back and do his dirty work. What follows is a dark tale of secrets and lies. Especially lies.

The parallels, of course, are strained. Charles Haughey's ambitions were more modest and his empire was confined to a few small islands, principally Ireland and the Caymans. The conspiracies that surrounded him may have generated a similar atmosphere of paranoia, but they were rather petty stuff. Those who did his dirty work were more likely to be accountants than secret policemen. The only aspect in which the scale remains the same is that of secrets and lies.

In the business of deceiving the public and later attempting to mislead a tribunal, Haughey himself was no slouch. What is becoming clear, however, is that those who orbited around him picked up many of the same habits. The events of recent weeks, culminating with the threat of a second chapter of Liam Lawlor's adventures in Mountjoy, have revealed a culture of extraordinary brazenness.

We have seen both a deep assurance that people in the know could lie and get away with it and the appearance for the first time of severe cracks in that wall of confidence. It is hard, from the outside, to fathom quite how deeply these people believed in their own ultimate impunity.

The extraordinary thing, if Liam Lawlor is returned to jail, is the impudence that made it necessary. Here is a man who has already suffered the humiliation of a week in jail last January. At the time, the general belief was that this previously unimaginable fate would change things forever. Never again would such a figure treat a tribunal with such implicit contempt. The aura of untouchability had surely been shattered forever.

And yet, Liam Lawlor's response was simply to shower the Flood tribunal with documents while remaining evasive about the transactions that lay behind them. To anyone outside the political culture which Liam Lawlor has inhabited, this seems incredibly stupid. Only from the inside does it seem entirely logical. From the behaviour of others within the same circles, we get a glimpse of a topsy-turvy world.

In this parallel universe, the norm is to conceal, to evade and, if necessary to lie. The truth is something you acknowledge only as a last resort.

THE builders Tom Brennan and Joe McGowan, who contributed what was then the vast sum of £245,000 to Ray Burke and Fian na Fail in the 1970s and 1980s, are a prime example. Both men gave evidence under oath to the Flood tribunal last year.

Both told the tribunal stories which coincided with what was then the state of Ray Burke's evidence. Only when Burke was forced by the tribunal's investigations to "correct" his evidence, did these carefully constructed stories begin to fall apart. Last year, Joe McGowan swore that he had never made "a personal political donation" in his life. The basic story was that the builders held annual fundraising events for Burke with a target of £10,000 a year. One payment of £20,000 in 1977 was explained by Joe McGowan by a "spectacular win" on a horse at Cheltenham.

The story relied on the confident belief that the tribunal would not discover offshore payments of £50,000, £60,000 and £15,000 to Mr Burke between 1982 and 1985. At no point did Tom Brennan or Joe McGowan volunteer information which the tribunal did not already have. The operation of almost a dozen offshore companies was kept secret.

As Patricia Dillon for the tribunal put it to Joe McGowan last week, "you made a deliberate attempt to build Chinese walls to hide the fact that your offshore companies made payments to Mr Burke's offshore company". This information was withheld until March this year "when you realised that there was nothing further you could do to conceal it".

Joe McGowan's excuses were pitched at the level of an eight-year-old who hasn't handed up his school project. He "hadn't done my homework or research". It was all a "misunderstanding". He was "confused". He "had no recollection of these payments at the time".

The brazenness, however, was not irrational. Joe McGowan had a good reason to believe he would get away with it: he had done it before. In 1985, he had sworn in a High Court affidavit that he had not moved money out of the jurisdiction; that he did not have money in the Channel Islands; that he was not the owner of a company called Canio Ltd; and that he had not failed to disclose his beneficial interest in any company. All this was, as he finally admitted last week, "a tissue of lies". "When you are cornered, you lie," Patricia Dillon for the tribunal told him.

This week, however, there was also evidence that the fate of Liam Lawlor and the relentless exposure of Joe McGowan may be having an effect. Last December, the tribunal asked the former government press secretary P.J. Mara to disclose full details of all his banks accounts. In January, Mr Mara provided details of four accounts with AIB, three with a building society and a number of other bank accounts and credit card accounts.

Quite suddenly, last Friday, his lawyers wrote to the tribunal with details of two accounts held for a company called Pullman Ltd at the Royal Bank of Scotland in the Isle of Man.

The sudden improvement in P.J. Mara's memory may be merely coincidental, or it may be that with the help of Mr Justice Smyth in the High Court, the tribunal has discovered a remarkable cure for amnesia. As with most miracle cures, this one may need several doses to be administered before it is fully effective. But the prognosis is vastly better than it was even a year ago.