Liam Lawlor

Liam Aloysius Lawlor (October 19, 1944–October 22, 2005) was an Irish politician who resigned from the Fianna Fáil political party following a finding by a Party standards committee that he had failed to co-operate with its investigation into planning irregularities, and subsequently came into conflict with an official Tribunal of Inquiry into planning and payments.

Early life

Liam Lawlor was born in Dublin. He grew up in Crumlin and was educated at Synge Street CBS and the College of Technology. In his youth, he played hurling and was on the Dublin minors and the Leinster Railway Cup teams. After college, he went into the refrigeration business, running his own company.

Professional life

In 1974, he unsuccessfully stood as a candidate in the local elections to Dublin County Council. In 1977 he was elected to Dáil Éireann for Dublin West County as a Fianna Fáil Teachta Dála (TD). In 1979, he became a member of Dublin County Council.

At the 1981 general election he lost his Dáil seat in what was now the constituency of Dublin West, regained it in February 1982, but lost it again in the November 1982 general election. Lawlor regained his Dáil seat again in the 1987 electon. That year he was appointed Chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Commercial State-Sponsored Bodies. He resigned the position in 1989 due to his position as a non-executive director of Food Industries, a company that wished to acquire the Irish Sugar Company. In 1990 he was one of the first to speak out against the leadership style of Charles Haughey. In 1991 he lost his seat on Dublin City Council, and in the 1992 general election he nearly lost his Dáil seat to Tomás MacGiolla.

Liam Lawlor was one of a number of local councillors who were called as witnesses before the Flood Tribunal investigating planning and payments in County Dublin. He admitted receiving sums of money from the lobbyist Frank Dunlop which he stated were political donations and not bribes.

Lawlor was also a European member of the controversial private political group, the Trilateral Commission.

Resignation

In the light of allegations of planning corruption, Fianna Fáil established an internal committee on Standards in Public Life. The committee interviewed a number of Party members, including Lawlor, but eventually found that Lawlor had failed to co-operate with it by not naming an individual who had furnished him with a donation. On the even of publication of the committee report in June 2000, Lawlor resigned from the party; however he continued to support the government in the Dáil. He did not stand in the 2002 general election. Lawlor appeared at the Tribunal several times and was imprisoned on three occasions (in January 2001, January 2002 and February 2002, for a total of six weeks) in Mountjoy Prison for contempt of court arising from Orders of the High Court requiring him to co-operate with the tribunal. The final report of the Tribunal, now chaired by Mr Justice Alan Mahon, is awaited.

Death

Lawlor was killed on October 22, 2005, when the Mercedes-Benz car he was being driven in on the way from Sheremetyevo International Airport crashed into a concrete lamppost on the Leningrad Shosse, the main road between St. Petersburg and Moscow, twenty-three kilometers from Moscow. Lawlor had been travelling with Julia Kushnir, a Ukrainian legal assistant, aged 29, confirmed by the Lawlor family to be working as Mr Lawlor's interpreter in Russia. She was injured in the crash that killed Mr. Lawlor. The driver, a Russian businessman, Ruslan Suliamanov, was fatally injured, when he swerved the car to avoid a man and a woman who ran out onto the road in front of it.

The funeral of Mr. Lawlor was held in Lucan on October 26.

False media claims about the accident

The Russian police initially reported that the woman in Lawlor's car may have been a sixteen-year-old prostitute, the accident occurred near Ikea. The report was the lead in a number of Irish Sunday newspapers. The Sunday Independent editor Aengus Fanning apologised to the Lawlor family for the report, following a public outcry on the reportage and condemnation of the publication from the National Union of Journalists. The Sunday Tribune, the Sunday World, The Observer, and a number of British tabloids also published the claim. The Observer initially refused to apologise for the error, but on the Tuesday following the accident, the newspaper issued a statement saying that "serious discrepancies" had arisen in the story it had published, and admitted that it had erred^*, removing the story from its website. The controversial nature of the coverage led to calls for a body to regulate and oversee standards in the Irish press similar to the Press Complaints Commission in the UK.

Reaction to Lawlor's death

Reacting to his death, the Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern called Lawlor a "engaging, witty and a larger-than-life character".

Sources

Irish Independent story on resignation from Fianna Fáil
RTE
The Irish Times, 24 October 2005
The Irish Times, 25 October 2005 (for the spellings of the names of Lawlor's fellow passenger and driver). The site requires paid subscription.
Statement issued by Ms Kushnir to the Irish media, 2 November 2005