Starting today, Mr Liam Lawlor TD becomes one of the most powerful members of Dail Eireann. He could, with a little help, destroy the current coalition Government and this Dail. Mr Lawlor is not a man who is afraid of power. Depending on the Flood tribunal, it remains to be proven whether he is afraid to abuse it.
Mr Lawlor's new powers are handed to him on a plate by Fianna Fail. Perhaps the party believed it was gentlemanly to enable him to leave it on his own terms. But rather than falling on his sword, he has merely stabbed himself with a plastic picnic knife. While he soothes his ruffled feathers, the party still faces the problem of healing its open sore.
Mr Lawlor's own words ask us to believe that his departure from Fianna Fail happened for reasons of public service and on the most moral of grounds: the national question and how sensitive negotiations are at the moment. So far, none of his former colleagues has disputed this.
The persistent failure to diagnose the best way of managing links with what might be called the entrepreneurial classes leaves all political parties vulnerable, but especially Fianna Fail. Its self-styled brand as a pro-development and pro-business party is encouraging it to view as imprudent practices and actions which in anyone else's mouth are downright sharp.
Fianna Fail believes that business should be as unregulated, or as under-regulated, as possible in order for it to thrive. Now, it appears to extend the same principles to politics itself.
The air of puzzled decency that infuses its curious report on Standards in Public Life fails to account for how men like Mr Lawlor could survive and flourish within the party, and within public life. Fine, admirable words about public service stick in its gullet when it comes to the sections on what can be done to limit such actions in the future. It makes no serious recommendations to take immediate effect.
THE party is stuck halfway between being a private business and a democratic public body. Fianna Fail, it seems, does not want to tie itself up with constricting regulations. ail report offers a dazzling glimpse of its preferred political future. as a body. The long-fingering of any serious political regulations suggests it prefers to see itself more as a business and less as a major public service concern.
The report stays firmly with the principal characters and allegations already in the public domain. It attributes the current change of atmosphere not to a process of self-scrutiny but to something called modernisation, as if the process entails little more than a lick of paint.
It passes no judgment on the Quarryvale rezoning which bypassed the people of Clondalkin, while mentioning claims that even some local priests from Clondalkin lobbied councillors in its favour.
Behind its many words lie major questions. Where is the money? In this strange grown-up game of painting by numbers some £100,000 identified by Frank Dunlop is still missing. Dunlop claimed he made 38 payments totalling £185,000. Either he got his arithmetic wrong, or quite a few other people in Fine Gael and Fianna Fail did.
And where was the Taoiseach? Smarter than Mr John Bruton, who had sat with his investigators like a village schoolmaster and gained nothing, Mr Ahern was actively confirming Mr Lawlor's view of how sensitive is the national question by lining up meetings in Downing Street, to be followed by giving his personal attention to the unfinished business of the Hamill case.
No sense was conveyed that Fianna Fail will continue to fight the good fight against political corruption. The report might as well have been a minor administrative matter, better delegated to line managers than to senior lieutenants. Its launch was headed by such party stalwarts as Mr Rory O'Hanlon and Mr David Andrews, neither of whom will stand at the next election.
FIANNA Fail tolerated Mr Lawlor's political behaviour for almost all of his political career. This is a man whose ethical stutterings were previously checked by no less a person than Mr Charles J. Haughey. The lengths to which he was permitted to go were extraordinary: potential rezoning scandals, potential monopoly violations during the Food Industries attempted buy-out of Irish Sugar and, in the Moby Dick of Fianna Fail navigations, during the Beef Tribunal, when Mr Lawlor was revealed to have travelled as a Goodman representative to Iraq while simultaneously belonging to the Government party.
Why give him a soft landing? The scale of his personality, never mind the scale of allegations against him, make him an inevitable object of public attention. His implied threats to name other political names to the Flood tribunal, and his circuitous references to planning in south Dublin, suggest that the party is willing to be further compromised by speculation that a deal may have been done, with the price being Mr Lawlor's exit on his own terms.
Fianna Fail is a party of paradoxes. You can be rich but see yourself as a working man. You can be poor, and give your life to public service in its name. You can work within it for a united Ireland and a united Europe at the same time.
Mr Lawlor is not a distraction to the serious politics of this Government, as he claims without contradiction. The allegations against him, and the system he operates in, are the problem. Implied in nearly every word his former party colleagues utter is the belief that business cannot be done properly unless you factor in a few rough diamonds. The reality being revealed makes them closer to a lump of coal.
mruane@irish-times.ie