Two months ago the Dail Committee on Members' Interests was given the job of investigating a complaint that the Fianna Fail TD, Denis Foley, had breached the Ethics in Public Office Act.

At one level, it may have seemed slightly unusual that one of the five members of the committee that is to sit in judgment on the ethics of Mr Foley was Liam Lawlor. Even at the time, before this week's revelation that Lawlor was one of the recipients of payments made to Dublin county councillors by Frank Dunlop on behalf of the property developer Owen O'Callaghan, it was known that he himself was being investigated by the Flood tribunal. Yet only yesterday did Lawlor express his willingness to withdraw from the Foley investigation.

At another level, though, Lawlor's presence on the committee seemed entirely apt. Few serving politicians have as much experience of handling ethical controversy as Lawlor has accumulated over the last 15 years.

Though far from prominent on issues of public policy, he has had an extraordinary knack of being in the vicinity of contentious episodes. Other than Charles Haughey, no Irish politician has occupied so prominently the crossroads where politics and business intersect. And though this week's revelations focus on local government decisions in west Dublin, Lawlor's involvement in those areas has taken him all the way from Lucan to Baghdad.

Living as he does in a magnificent Georgian house outside Lucan, Lawlor has long had the appearance of personal prosperity. He has also been a formidable political fund-raiser. Last year's declaration under the Ethics in Public Office Act shows, for example, that he raised £17,600 from a single golf classic, making him the Dail's leading individual recipient of political contributions.

The Register of Interests also shows that he has links with a company called Demographic and Strategic Consultants, with Rotary M&E Services and with a property development company in the Czech Republic. Previous registers have listed another consultancy company, Eastern International.

Initially, when Lawlor's involvement in the events being investigated by the Flood tribunal first came to public attention, it seemed to be related to this consultancy role. In October 1998 he acknowledged that he had been paid £3,500 a month for three or four months in the late 1980s by the property developer Tom Gilmartin, who was seeking to develop both the Quarryvale site and a scheme at Bachelor's Walk in central Dublin. At first, Lawlor indicated that these were "consultancy fees" paid in return for demographic and economic information on Dublin.

Later, however, he insisted that the payments were "contributions" from Tom Gilmartin. In a statement issued in October 1998 he said he would be consulting his accountant to ensure that he had "fully complied with the tax aspect" of these payments.

Two months later, Lawlor denied a claim by Tom Gilmartin that it was he who had set up a meeting in Leinster House between Gilmartin and Charles Haughey, Bertie Ahern and Brian Lenihan. "I did not arrange a meeting", he told the Dail in January 1999, "and I was not in attendance at such a meeting."

Last June lawyers for the Flood tribunal told the High Court that it had told Lawlor that it had information suggesting that he and a former local authority official were paid monies by a certain party in connection with the procurement of planning permissions.

They also said the tribunal had put eight questions to him about alleged payments to him by Tom Gilmartin and that he was the only person elected to Dublin County Council in 1985 who had refused to be interviewed by the tribunal's lawyers. The Supreme Court found, however, that Lawlor was perfectly within his rights not to answer such questions before he was formally called before a public session of the tribunal.

Quarryvale and Tom Gilmartin were not Lawlor's only controversial dealings with the planning process, however. Twenty-three acres of land on Newcastle Road, Lucan, which he himself owned, was sold in July 1995 to a firm of house-builders. It was part of the largest single tract of agricultural land - 500 acres in all - to be rezoned for housing by South Dublin County Council in its draft development plan.

There have, moreover, been suggestions of a connection between Lawlor and the disgraced former assistant city and county manager, George Redmond. In March 1999 RTE's Charlie Bird reported on the compulsory purchase, with Redmond's assistance, of a bungalow and two acres of land on the city side of the West Link toll bridge from its owner, Jim Kennedy. Redmond and Kennedy were reported to be partners in an amusement arcade in the city centre, and Lawlor was said to have met Redmond there. Lawlor confirmed that he knew both George Redmond and Jim Kennedy, but denied ever attending a meeting with both of them or meeting Redmond in Kennedy's arcade.

The Flood tribunal may eventually be able to clarify all of these matters. But Lawlor's experience of ethical controversy is by no means confined to the areas that come within its terms of reference. For he was also an intriguing presence in one of the most far-reaching relationships between business and politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, that between Charles Haughey and the powerful beef baron, Larry Goodman. In the dangerous liaison between the State and the Goodman empire, only one figure clearly had a foot in both camps - Liam Lawlor.

On the one side, Lawlor was, of course, a prominent Fianna Fail TD. On the other, he was also close to the Goodman organisation. In the late 1980s, when Goodman was seeking to extend his control from the beef sector into the entire Irish food industry, Lawlor was an important ally. When Goodman was locked in a battle with Killeshandra Co-Op for the control of Bailieboro Co-Op, Lawlor's own personal political machine mounted a strong canvass of Bailieboro shareholders on Goodman's behalf. Shortly afterwards, Lawlor joined the board of Goodman's public company, Food Industries, as a non-executive director.

In 1988, however, his double role as a politician and a member of the Goodman team created an apparent conflict of interest. On the one side, he was chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on State-Sponsored Bodies. At the time the committee was looking into the affairs of the Irish Sugar Company, which was being mooted for privatisation.

On the other hand, Food Industries had alerted the Minister for Agriculture, Michael O'Kennedy, to its interest in acquiring Irish Sugar. Lawlor was thus heading an investigation into a company which, as part of the board of Food Industries, he and Larry Goodman were trying to acquire.

The controversy which developed when this was pointed out by Dick Walsh in The Irish Times centred on whether or not Lawlor had seen a consultant's report on the Irish Sugar plant in Thurles that had been prepared for the committee, and whether this had been passed on to Food Industries. A Dail investigation exonerated Lawlor of any wrongdoing in the affair, but he resigned his position on the committee.

Even while this was going on, however, Lawlor was deeply involved in the extraordinary triangular relationship between Charles Haughey's government, Larry Goodman and the tyrannical ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

For reasons that even the extraordinarily lengthy beef tribunal failed to clarify, Haughey's government, at a time of economic crisis, exposed the public finances to huge risks by guaranteeing that if Saddam did not pay for vast quantities of beef which Goodman was selling him, the State would come up with the money.

The risks of non-payment (which in fact subsequently became a reality) had been independently assessed at "fifty-fifty". The economic benefits for Ireland as a whole were, the tribunal found, non-existent. Unfortunately, neither Charles Haughey nor Larry Goodman could recall the details of private meetings between them at Haughey's home.

By January 1989, when Saddam was proving very tardy with his payments to Goodman, Lawlor was in Baghdad. This was not his first visit there. He told a newspaper that he had in fact been in Iraq "five or six times" since 1983, though the nature of his previous visits is unclear. On this visit, however, he was trying to collect debts owed to Goodman by the Iraqi regime. But again his dual role as a Fianna Fail politician and a Goodman representative caused considerable disquiet.

In a contemporary memo disclosed to the beef tribunal, the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin expressed its concern that Lawlor was "allowing the Iraqi side to understand that he was there as a public representative rather than as somebody connected to the Goodman organisation."

A particular cause of unease was a minute prepared by Lawlor of a meeting between, on the one side, himself and another Goodman representative, Gerry Maynes, and on the other, the Iraqi Ministry for Health and State Company for Foodstuffs Trading. The meeting was attended by an Irish embassy official, Paul Rowan.

In his minutes, Lawlor described himself, Maynes and Rowan as "the Irish delegation". The Department of Foreign Affairs saw this as "a misleading, indeed, I don't think it is too strong to say, a dangerous report, in the sense that it conveyed the impression that it was an inter-governmental meeting. It conveyed the impression that Lawlor was leading a mixed delegation as a member of the Irish parliament."

As a contemporary note in the Department put it, "there is a certain risk in allowing the private sector, in this case Goodman's (sic), to represent its own interests in Baghdad as being those of the State."

In his defence, Lawlor insisted that the Irish Embassy in Baghdad had co-operated with his efforts. He produced in the Dail a letter to him from the Department of Foreign Affairs accepting that "in the course of visits which you paid to Baghdad, you carried out economic-related activities including raising with the Iraqi authorities the question of payments due to Irish companies.

"You were briefed on these issues by the Embassy and accompanied to some of the meetings by representatives of the Embassy." Instead of refuting the notion that Lawlor's dual role blurred the distinction between the State and private interests, however, this letter seems to confirm it.

All of this suggests that an investigation of Lawlor's financial affairs could eventually throw light on more than the workings of Dublin County Council. Irish public life may well be illuminated by Liam Lawlor's vast experience of the political and business worlds.