Coolness itself on the `hot money' questions

Beverley Cooper-Flynn must have been confused. An incredulous counsel for the defence was asking her how she failed to be suspicious about the savings offered her by an investor in 1994. "Alarm bells would have rung," suggested Kevin Feeney SC, "unless you deliberately closed your eyes".

Maybe he was thinking of silent alarm bells, with flashing lights. But whatever sort of alarms he had in mind, he felt sure they must have gone off when an unnamed client offered Ms Cooper-Flynn an investment comprising £46,000 in his wife's maiden name, £26,000 in an Isle of Man account, and £30,000 in cash sterling.

Ms Cooper-Flynn insisted there had been no alarms, visible or otherwise. The client was in the pub business and "pubs get sterling from time to time," she said. The Mayo TD was unflappable on the fifth day of her libel action. In a packed courtroom that grew uncomfortably warm, perhaps from counsel's repeated questions about "hot" money, she was coolness itself.

There was no repeat of the tears of earlier days, even when Mr Feeney called her unquestioning faith in the 1994 investment "a barefaced lie". Nor when the suspicious minds of the defence team had difficulty believing that, as investment adviser in NIB, she had occasionally suggested clients withdraw money from the bank and put it in the post office.

Like any politician, she would not hear criticisms of her policies, in this case the controversial Clerical and Medical Insurance (CMI) policies. And her legal team won one battle during the day when, after lengthy argument, the jury was told to disregard evidence given on Friday by a witness who said he would produce a receipt from Ms Cooper-Flynn for money she knew to he "hot".

But Mr Feeney named four more former clients who would give evidence that she had stressed the invisibility of the CMI polices from the prying eyes of Revenue. Ms Cooper-Flynn agreed she had once met one of the named investors "in his bus". She had no memory, however, of telling him the CMI was "safe as houses", or that "top judges and politicians" were among the investors.