IT was January 2002 and Liam Lawlor, the disgraced TD who had resigned from Fianna Fail, had just won a lifeline in his bid to avoid being sent to jail for a third time.

High Court judges had described his obstructive tactics in the then Flood tribunal as “blatant defiance” that “demanded a custodial sentence”. Most people in his position would have gone to ground, but not Lawlor.

The angry TD appeared on RTE television blaming the “gutter” media for his difficulties. A few months later Lawlor bowed to the inevitable and decided not to defend his seat in Dublin West.

It was no wonder, then, that when news of his death in a car accident in Moscow emerged yesterday, Bertie Ahern, speaking at the Fianna Fail ard fheis, described Lawlor as “never afraid to articulate trenchantly”.

According to the taoiseach, Lawlor will be remembered as an engaging, witty and larger-than-life character with a keen intellect that made him popular with colleagues.

Similar views were expressed by opposition TDs, whose tributes were more than generous to a former politician who was the central character in a corruption tribunal.

Also a sportsman and businessman, Lawlor stood at the intersection of almost every scandal that criss-crossed Irish political life in the 1980s and 1990s.

Born in 1945, Lawlor was educated in the Christian Brothers, Synge Street and then got an engineering diploma. An outstanding hurler, the highlight of his career was lining up alongside Eddie Keher of Kilkenny on the 1970 Leinster team in the Railway Cup final.

Lawlor joined Fianna Fail at the age of 16 and accompanied Charles Haughey in the 1970s as the former taoiseach built grassroots support for a leadership bid. But Lawlor backed George Colley for the leadership of Fianna Fail in 1979, apparently because he was offered a ministry. Haughey offered him nothing.

Lawlor became embroiled in the first of many planning controversies in 1980 and lost his Dail seat in 1981. He was re-elected in 1987, but in the meantime he became a business consultant and was hired by the likes of Larry Goodman and Tom Gilmartin, a developer. It was his role in several questionable business transations in those years that would eventually ruin his political career.

Ironically, Lawlor’s last political appointment was to the Dail’s ethics committee, where he sat in judgment over Denis Foley, a former Fianna Fail colleague who had an Ansbacher account.

Lawlor denied ever receiving a penny for favours, but he never properly explained the source of more than €3m in his 18 bank accounts, and he was jailed three times for obstructing the work of the tribunal.

The most fitting epithet for Lawlor came yesterday from his former constituency colleague, the Labour party’s Joan Burton. She said he was a man of “striking intelligence and immense abilities. He would have gone far if he had directed these skills in the right direction”.

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