Kilkenny-born Frank Dunlop became a press officer for Fianna Fáil in 1974 after a brief stint as a correspondent in Belfast for RTÉ.
He later became government press secretary under successive Fianna Fáil governments from 1977 to 1982.
He also advised the late former taoiseach Charles Haughey, who was later found to have received millions of euro from businessmen during his career.
After Fianna Fáil lost power in 1982, Dunlop secured a senior civil servant’s role in the administration led by Fine Gael. He later worked with the Department of Environment under minister John Boland and gained a detailed knowledge of the planning process.
Dunlop left the civil service in 1986 and used his contacts with politicians in his new role as a public relations consultant and after amassing an impressive portfolio of clients, he struck out on his own to establish his own firm, Frank Dunlop & Associates in 1989.
He began to increasingly focus on helping developers “buy votes” at council meetings to approve projects such as shopping centres or housing developments. From 1997 to 2000, Dunlop co-presented a political chat show on the state broadcaster, RTÉ.
However, RTÉ immediately dropped him after news began to emerge from the long-running Planning Tribunal that he had paid bribes to politicians. The 12-year inquiry, which will issue its final damning report next year, has sat for more than 900 days and could cost the taxpayer up to €300 million.
When he first took the witness stand in 2000, the tribunal’s then chairman Judge Feargus Flood rejected Dunlop’s initially coy evidence by asking him to reflect overnight on his position.
Most expected Dunlop to stone-wall again in the witness box the following day but the ashen-faced father-of-one suddenly cracked. He began to reveal payments that he had made to named politicians stretching back several years. Over the next 124 days on the stand he told how he kept a stash of cash to bribe county councillors on a regular basis.
The money was sometimes handed over in brown paper bags in pubs, hotels and even the grounds of a psychiatric hospital in south Dublin. When the allegations first emerged, several panicked politicians telephoned him trying to discover how much he had paid them.
Long before Dunlop stood down from the witness box his public relations career was in ruins.
Dunlop is believed to have been introduced to many landowners and developers by late Fianna Fáil TD Liam Lawlor, who later served three jail terms for failing to co-operate with the Mahon Tribunal. He died in a car crash outside Moscow in October 2005.
Dunlop wrote a book about his time in politics, including his relationship with former taoisigh, including Mr Haughey, Yes Taoiseach, in 2004.
He graduated with a law degree from Griffith College Dublin in 2007.