Lawlor awaits jail decision after frantic efforts to meet tribunal deadline
Seven boxes containing 30 files arrived by taxi at Dublin Castle shortly after 4.30pm yesterday.
Tribunal chairman Judge Alan Mahon had given Mr Lawlor until close of business yesterday to swear an affidavit that he would provide the information the tribunal sought or risk contempt proceedings.
Mr Lawlor's eleventh-hour effort to stay out of jail involved a team of family and friends. His daughter Ciara arrived back in Dublin on Monday night with documents from solicitors in Prague.
Mr Lawlor travelled to London on Friday where he met with representatives of two legal firms and collected more files.
It is also understood Mr Lawlor has given two firms of solicitors a lien on his 2.5 million share in the ownership of the drainage system on the Adamstown lands near Lucan where a proposed town for 20,000 is to be built.
Mr Lawlor spent six weeks in jail on three separate occasions after the High Court found he had failed to co-operate with the tribunal probing allegations of planning corruption and payments made to politicians.
At the tribunal yesterday, Dublin FF councillor Larry Butler disputed claims by landowners that he offered to get party colleagues from outside his electoral area to support rezoning motions to which he himself was publicly opposed.
He claimed a note of a 1992 meeting he had with landowners in Carrickmines was not correct when it recorded him saying he could not support a motion himself but would ask other FF colleagues.
Architect Brian O'Halloran, one of the landowners who was trying to get his land rezoned, kept meticulous notes of all his meetings.
Answering tribunal counsel Pat Quinn SC, Mr Butler said there might have been some misunderstanding.
According to Mr O'Halloran, Mr Butler offered to canvass FF councillors in the other areas but pointed out he would not be supporting the motion because it went against the wishes of the residents. When political lobbyist Frank Dunlop at a meeting in the Tara Towers Hotel on September 30, 1997, asked him to sign a rezoning motion, he said he refused.
Labour councillor John O'Halloran rejected allegations by Mr Dunlop that he had actively supported him in relation to the development of the Carrickmines lands.
Mr Dunlop alleges he gave him a total of £7,500 after the councillor complained he was getting nothing while others were "coining it".
Mr O'Halloran said he solicited political donations, not payments for supporting rezoning or planning matters.
Mr O'Halloran, who was elected to the west Dublin Lucan ward in June 1991, has admitted forgetting he received three Dunlop payments two for £500 each and one for £250.
But he denied these and other payments related to support for the Carrickmines project.
He insisted he didn't realise Mr Dunlop had clients other than the Quarryvale development in west Dublin which he himself was supporting.
The chairman asked if he thought Mr Dunlop was giving his own money to Mr O'Halloran out of the goodness of his heart and was some type of Santa Claus figure.
People didn't give such large sums of money unless they agreed politically with one, were a constituent, or wanted something in return, the chairman suggested.
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