The Dublin West TD, Liam Lawlor, has been sent back to jail for non-compliance with a court order to produce documents to the Flood Tribunal. Mr Lawlor has been ordered by the High Court to spend seven days in prison beginning on 8 August. He has also been fined £5,000. If the fine is not paid by the end of August, Mr Lawlor will return to prison for a month.
Mr Justice Thomas Smyth said that the Tribunal was not to be trifled with. He said that he was unable to accept Mr Lawlor's lawyers' submission that censure or admonition would meet this case in any way. He refused to grant a stay on the order, pending an appeal by Mr Lawlor.
Last January Mr Lawlor served one week of a three-month sentence for contempt of court. Mr Justice Thomas Smyth memorably stated, "There are no untouchables", when he sent the Deputy to jail.
At the time, he suspended all but one week of the three-month sentence to allow Mr Lawlor to comply with a court order to supply the Tribunal with documentation about his financial affairs going back to the 1970s. Mr Lawlor was also fined £10,000 and Judge Smyth set out a strict timetable for compliance.
Since then Mr Lawlor has supplied the Flood Tribunal with 52,000 pages of documents and his lawyer John Trainor said that he had made a sustained effort to comply with the Tribunal. But the Tribunal claimed he had not met his obligations and the case returned to the High Court last week for a judicial ruling.
