Brazen is one word that has been used to describe Liam Lawlor TD. "Brass-necked" would be another apt characterisation. For despite all the evidence that he turned politics into a business, he had also "perfected the technique of hiding while in full public view", as one colleague put it. And it worked, at least until yesterday. For 20 years Lawlor used his role as a public representative to amass substantial sums of money from private clients, many of them property developers. What he had to sell was his "inside track" in the corridors of power at Leinster House and in the Augean stables of Dublin County Council, where land rezoning was always top of the agenda.
According to calculations by lawyers for the Flood tribunal, based on the information supplied to them so far, no less than £4.6 million was deposited in Lawlor's numerous bank accounts both in Ireland and abroad over the years. And that staggering sum does not even include money that went through his credit card accounts.
In the late 1980s the Dublin West TD had a top-of-the-range, chauffeur-driven Mercedes Benz at a time when his Dail salary was just £22,000. How that car was acquired was one of the issues examined in a 1989 Garda investigation of planning corruption.
Questions about Lawlor's modus operandi arose early in his political career, just three years after he was first elected to the Dail in 1977 at the age of 32, when his Fianna Fail colleagues on Dublin County Council pushed through a motion to rezone a large parcel of land in south Lucan, including Lawlor's 29-acre holding at Somerton.
The TD, who had been elected as a councillor in 1979, was not present for the April 1980 meeting at which this decision was made and claimed at the time that he had no hand, act or part in it. But the subsequent disclosure that he stood to make a large killing caused a major public outcry, resulting in a reversal of the rezoning 18 months later.
Throughout the periods he served on the county council, it was clear that Lawlor was one of the major players. He assiduously attended meetings on the county development plan, often tabling land-rezoning motions at the behest of property interests, even where these were strenuously opposed by the council's professional planners.
He became an expert on planning and took an active interest in preparing the controversial ERDO (Eastern Regional Development Organisation) plan for the expansion of Dublin in 1985. He also worked closely with George Redmond, the discredited former county manager, and his friend, Mr Jim Kennedy, a reclusive Lucan-based businessman.
Lawlor offered freelance advice to property developers with big plans, including Mr Tom Gilmartin, who was paying him £3,500 a month in consultancy fees in the late 1980s. One of his "services" was to introduce Mr Gilmartin to the councillors whose support he would need to secure the rezoning of Quarryvale for the Liffey Valley shopping centre.
Allegations about Lawlor's role in this murky area were examined by the Garda's investigation of planning corruption in Co Dublin in 1989-90, from which he emerges ". . . with his good reputation unscathed," according to the official report of this inquiry. Unlike the Flood tribunal, the Garda had no access to Lawlor's bank accounts.
It was not just in the planning arena that Liam Lawlor had an apparent conflict of interest. In 1988, while he was chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on State-Sponsored Bodies, he became a director of Food Industries plc, a subsidiary of the Goodman group, at a time when the committee was inquiring into the affairs of Irish Sugar.
Food Industries had indicated its interest in acquiring Irish Sugar, and the issue that arose was whether Lawlor, as a director of the Goodman firm, had seen a consultant's report on the State-owned sugar company's plant in Thurles, Co Tipperary. Although a Dail inquiry exonerated him of any wrongdoing, he resigned his post on the committee.
In the early 1990s Lawlor clearly ran into financial difficulties, with judgments registered against him by Bank of Ireland for £49,122, Woodchester/Credit Lyonnais (£23,926), Bank of Nova Scotia (£18,000), Cambridge Financial Services (£18,000) and the Irish Nationwide Building Society, which sought a court order to repossess his home.
Lawlor cleared this raft of debt by selling the bulk of his holding at Somerton, Lucan, by public auction in July 1995 to a firm of house-builders for £410,000.
Three years later, no doubt to his chagrin, this land was rezoned by South Dublin County Council for residential development, massively increasing its value to an estimated £8 million. ail councillors.
Last April the lobbyist Mr Frank Dunlop told the tribunal he paid money to a number of politicians in return for planning favours. Mr Lawlor denies he was the "Mr Big" who allegedly received over £40,000 from Mr Dunlop, for whom he acted as a consultant in the 1980s.
Last June Mr Lawlor resigned from Fianna Fail after he was criticised in the party's internal inquiry into payments by Mr Dunlop. The party has since selected its own candidates to contest the next general election in his Dublin Mid West constituency.
Mr Lawlor's last political appointment was as vice-chair of the Oireachtas ethics committee, where he sat in judgment over a fellow Fianna Fail TD, Mr Denis Foley, who had an Ansbacher account. Mr Lawlor resigned from the committee last week when the PDs indicated they would vote in favour of a motion of no confidence in him.
During his four-day appearance in the witness box in Dublin Castle last December, tribunal lawyers claimed that £2.6 million of his income remained unexplained.
Wheels within wheels have always been an intricate element of Liam Lawlor's unusual career. "He could buy and sell most of his colleagues in Leinster House and they wouldn't even know it", said one Opposition TD. But the penalty for "scandalous" behaviour before the Flood tribunal, as Mr Justice Smyth put it, suggests that his goose is cooked.