IT IS a measure of the vagaries of politics that there was a time not long ago when colleagues of Michael Lowry described him as "lucky".
The Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications, whose meteoric rise to Cabinet rank has been matched only by his rapid sideways movements into controversy, must now look back with some wistfulness on those days.
But good fortune once came in no small measure to Mr Lowry. He was steeped with luck that his Dail predecessor in Tipperary North, Mr David Molony, retired in 1987 and allowed him to take the safe Fine Gael seat. Had the youthful Mr Molony remained in politics, Michael Lowry in all likelihood would never have seen the inside of the Dail as a TD.
When opportunity in business came his way, he seized it with the ruthlessness and vigour that would later become his hallmark in politics. After quitting school at Thurles CBS, he went to work with Butler Refrigeration, a local company, and became a highly valued member of the staff in the eyes of the firm's proprietor, Matt Butler.
To the astonishment of Mr Butler, he was informed while on a family holiday abroad in 1989 that his talented employee was off to establish his own company, Streamline Enterprises Ltd. Not only that, but he was taking some staff members with him.
The fledgling company, under Mr Lowry's guidance, secured the contract for refrigeration in Dunnes Stores in Munster, a most valuable aspect of Butler's business.
Michael Lowry has insisted that the lucrative Dunnes Stores contract - which now extends countrywide - did not come to him until "long after" he had left Matt Butler's company.
Signs of considerable ambition were by now truly apparent and he would later bring his money-drawing skills to bear on the Tipperary, GAA.
He was a senior club hurler with Holycross, but any hopes of a long career in this field foundered with a knee injury in his mid-20s. Instead he focused on the administrative end of the GAA, and later became chairman of the Mid Division of the Tipperary County Board.
After its centenary year celebrations in 1984, Semple Stadium in Thurles was buckling under debts of £1 million. He launched and chaired the Semple Stadium Management Committee and in the teeth of trenchant opposition from the GAA's own patron,
Archbishop Dermot Clifford, the Tipperary Star newspaper and many in the local community persisted with plans for Feile to eradicate the bill through a series of rock concerts in Thurles.
"Many people took a dim view of the affair because they saw themselves as prisoners in their own homes while these concerts were going on, but Michael Lowry did not suffer in the polls afterwards," one local says.
His clinics are a wonder to behold, a model of the clientelist system.
Run with factory-like precision, they involve an assistant greeting constituents, taking details of their troubles and briefing Mr Lowry fully before they enter his office. Secretaries get to work immediately on the telephone, be it a problem about a local authority house or a blocked drain, and it is not unusual for clients to leave Mr Lowry with the difficulty already sorted out.
"He is considered such a Mr Fixit, people come to his clinics, from outside his own North Tipp constituency," says one local.
They say that if a monkey stood for Fine Gael in Tipperary North, he would still get elected, but the obvious security of the seat has not prevented Mr Lowry from looking after it like a baby.
After years of campaigning, locals had given up on the idea of ever seeing a third-level educational institution in Thurles. Shortly after going into Government two years ago, Michael Lowry secured funding for a study of the project and, much to the joy of the community, work on the Tipperary Rural and Business Development Institute begins in the new year.
Further testimony of his attention to constituency detail can be found in the lead and zinc mine at Lisheen in Moyne - not far from Thurles - where a multi-million pound project is scheduled to deliver hundreds of jobs when operations are in full swing.
Work on the mine begins at the start of 1997. As Minister for Energy he can expect to collect a few votes on the back of that development.
He was born in March 1954, to Mick Lowry and his wife, Esther Bourke. His father, a publican in Dublin who bought and successfully ran a farm in Holycross, came from Fianna" Fail stock while the Bourke side was Fine Gael.
It was his mother's political genes that dominated in the youngsters. (His brother Phil was co-opted on to the local county council after he became a Minister.)
On the face of it, he did not appear to have the gregarious qualities one would associate with public life. He was not blessed with powers of oratory and was quiet, reserved even; a party associate in Tipperary says there are very few people who really know what's going on in his head or heart.
He drinks in moderation, favouring a bottle of Heineken in Doheny & Nesbitts, the Baggot Street hostelry frequented by politicians, lawyers and journalists.
Friends say he has a weakness, for horse-racing and likes a day at a meeting. He is married to Catherine McGrath from Borrisoleigh - not far from his home village and they have two sons and one daughter.
His initial political instinct seemed unerring. He endeared himself to the party leader, John Bruton, with trojan work on his behalf during the failed heave in early 1994; his value to the party was intensified when he applied his debt-eradicating skills to the Fine Gael debt as chairman of the party's trustees.
Small wonder that he was rewarded with a powerful ministry after he and the Taoiseach's brother, Richard Bruton, clinched the rainbow Coalition's programme for Government.
He came to Transport, Energy and Communications with all guns blazing. Time to shake up the semi-states, he warned. But then, just as his career curve seemed to turn inexorably upwards, he began to make mistakes.
Claims of surveillance - in which he implicated Fianna Fail businessmen - and allegations of cosy cartels" in the semi-states were never really substantiated, but they did weaken his standing in Cabinet.
To this day, the Pat Tuffy affair lingers. Mr Lowry is personally suing Sam Smyth, the reporter who also broke the story about the alleged Dunnes involvement in paying for building at the Lowry home.
The writ for defamation arises from comments-made by the journalist on an RTE Prime Time programme in 1995 following an interview with Mr Pat Tuffy. Mr Lowry is also suing RTE.