"IT WAS difficult to imagine any more serious defamation of a public person than in an article about Mr Proinsias De Rossa in a Sunday Independent article, the High Court was told yesterday.
Mr Adrian Hardiman SC, for Mr De Rossa, in his opening submission to the jury, said the Sunday Independent was a powerful newspaper with over a million readers. The paper published material which associated Mr De Rossa with truly horrible activities, such as subversion, armed robbery, drugs, prostitution and protection rackets.
It had done this to a man whose entire career has been spent opposing all these things. The only piece of evidence was on the basis of a letter which was forged in Mr De Rossa's name which not even the newspapers would say was composed by him. The libel was a very serious one.
Mr Hardiman said Mr De Rossa was the leader of Democratic Left and had been a Dail deputy since the early 1980s. He had been Minister of Social Welfare since December 1994.
For 30 years he had been involved in politics as a candidate a housing activist, a party worker party deputy and then leader and was now in government. His constituency was Dublin North West.
He said the defendant was Independent Newspapers, an enormous publishing company hugely successful and hugely influential. Its flagship publication was the Sunday Independent. The paper had over one million readers which was the highest ever recorded by an Irish newspaper. Many of its columnists were household names, as was the person who wrote the defamatory article, Mr Eamon Dunphy.
The newspaper was legally and morally responsible for what it published. The libel appeared on December 13th, 1992. In order to understand the effect this libel constituted, one must remember what was going on in the country at that time. There had just been a general election. There were negotiations going on for the formation of a coalition. Mr De Rossa's party, Democratic Left, took part in these negotiations.
At this time, Mr Eamon Dunphy wrote the libel specifically to suggest that Mr De Rossa and his associates should not be part of the coalition government.
Inevitably, the background to the case was political. Mr De Rossa was a politician and the paper wrote about politics. Mr Hardiman said that this was not a political case and there was no court that could treat it as such.
Mr De Rossa took the action as a private individual, with no greater advantage than any other citizen. The fact that he was a TD and a Minister did not increase or lessen his right to his good name.
Mr Hardiman said the jury may or may not like his party but that was irrelevant. Mr De Rossa and the Independent were entitled to the jury's impartial judgment. The libel would be destructive of any politician, right, left or centre, and absolutely destructive of any human being.
The jury would hear evidence from many people in his strongholds. His opponents would disagree with his political views but would tell the jury that he himself was a decent and honourable man, committed to democratic government and pursuing the good of the community and dedicated to service in government.
This was the reputation that the Sunday Independent attempted to take from him on December 13th. It did this by linking him to crime, drugs, prostitution, horrible things.
All of these activities were described in a phrase in the article as "special activities", a phrase which the jury would become familiar with. The central falsehood was that the defendant claimed Mr De Rossa made special reference to the special activities and, therefore, that he knew about them. Mr Hardiman said that it was an "outright falsehood".
To understand just how serious the situation was, the jury had to know something about Mr De Rossa and the circumstances. A major feature of his career was that he led and influenced a group with its roots in the nationalist tradition which strongly condemned violence and brutality. This was achieved by him despite a childhood based in strong nationalist tradition.
In the 1950s, at a time of a Border campaign, he was led with hundreds like him into old Sinn Fein and the former IRA. When he was 16 years, he was interned, the youngest internee, and held for two years. For many people, this would have left them embittered. He started to read and develop and marked the rest of his career with an absolute abhorrence of violence and the futility of it for political purposes. He became involved in the area of civil rights.
At this time, Mr De Rossa was not a well known person. He stood for election four times but was not elected. He increased his vote each time and was finally elected in 1982 after a decade of hard work. During that time he conducted a left-wing political campaign.
He was appalled by the outbreak of violence in 1969 and demanded a complete cessation. In recent months, he had spared no effort to revive the recent ceasefire.
The importance of all this was that the libel attacked him in the area in which he was most sensitive. For over 25 years, he had worked with dedication for peace and for an end to violence and intimidation which naturally trailed after political violence. This was the very area in which he was attacked without any justification by the Sunday Independent.
His strongest opponents would tell of his struggle for openness and democracy in the Workers Party, to which he was elected leader in 1988. It was an active, small group. In the 1980s, Mr De Rossa and quite a number of like- minded people were elected to the Dail. From being an obscure person, Mr De Rossa became much more prominent and a leader of a political party.
The Workers Party became a small, well-organised mainstream political party with a firm democratic base. Mr Hardiman said it was not necessary to share Mr De Rossa's political view to recognise that the party evolved very dramatically.
When he became leader in 1988, he made clear he was a reforming leader. The jury would hear he was a modernising, articulate and outgoing leader. He was determined the party was not going to stay in the old moulds from an economic or political point of view. Some people resented the rise of a new party on the left, others could not reconcile themselves to it.
He pressed ahead strongly with reforms and encountered opposition from within the party. That led to his proposing a new and open constitution for the party which contained outright condemnation of political violence. It got the backing of a large majority of votes but failed by a tiny number of votes to get a two-thirds majority. Mr De Rossa and a large number of other left.
Democratic Left was set up in March 1992, and there was a general election in November that year. Mr De Rossa found himself in negotiations with other party leaders. Democratic Left did not get into government then. As they negotiated, that was precisely when the utter falsehood by the Sunday Independent came on the scene.
On October 26th, 1992, the text of a letter was published in The Irish Times. Mr Hardiman said this letter was forged in that somebody deliberately and maliciously copied Mr De Rossa's signature.
The Sunday Independent did not allege in its defence that Mr De Rossa wrote or signed the letter. Nobody now claims that he wrote or signed that letter. The Sunday Independent sang a very different tune in December 1992. When one saw the article it would be seen that it attributed this letter to him and then when it established the falsehood, it went on to milk it for all it was worth.
There could be nothing more damning to Mr De Rossa. The letter dated on September 15th, 1986, purported to be a request from the Workers Party to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for £1 million in funds. The letter stated the bulk of a shortfall in their funding had been met by "special activities" which it was not possible to detail there.
If Mr De Rossa had written the letter, it would follow that he would have had knowledge of the special activities. Very quickly he denied authorship and any responsibility for the letter and in that he was proved right to the extent that today not even the Sunday Independent asserted that he wrote the letter but that is exactly what it did in the article.
After quoting the article, Mr
Hardiman said it was difficult to imagine any more serious defamation of a public person. It was terrible thing to say about someone unless it was true. It was all based on the supposition that he wrote and signed the Moscow letter. The falsehood had never been retracted.
The defence had been put in May 1994, in which it did not assert that Mr De Rossa was the author of the letter but never retracted what had been said but allowed that lie to linger.
People who wrote newspapers were entitled to have opinions and express them. Mr Dunphy was entitled to express his opinion. What he was not entitled to do was to state that Mr De Rossa wrote a forged letter and was therefore associated with various crimes mentioned and in some way was a friend of people who shot people crossing the Berlin Wall or persecuted Andre Sakharov and Vaclav Havel.
They were not concerned with the politics of the article. What was relevant was the factual allegations made about Mr De Rossa. Mr Dunphy had mentioned all the worse aspects of the former Soviet Union and attributed them to the class of people whom he described as Mr De Rossa's friends - at the very best hyperbole and at the worse a "McCarthyite smear". Mr De Rossa was never an uncritical admirer of the USSR.
His sole connection with Russia was an attempt to move them from support for the IRA and take a more realistic view. He went to the USSR in 1986 on a stopover on his way to an international disarmament conference in Korea. It was quite true that Mr De Rossa had serious reservations about Mr Reagan's "Star Wars" politics but to put him in the same bed as people who set up labour camps or shot people crossing the Berlin Wall was simply untrue.
He went to the USA in 1983 for the first time. Was it to be said that tainted him with American gun laws, racism? He was not more to be connected with thee worse aspects of Russia than the worse aspects of the United States.
This passage in the article was written for no other reason than to attempt to blacken him, it was just an unadulterated smear".
The phrase "special activities" - was never used by any person other than the anonymous author of the forged letter. Mr De Rossa had never used it.
The jury would hear that the Workers Party under Mr De Rossa was in a permanently poor financial situation.
Mr Dunphy and the Sunday Independent editor, Mr Aengus Fanning were in court. Mr Hardiman said they were now challenging them to go into the witness box, both of them, and stand over what they had written if they would and let them produce witnesses to support the case that was made in their pleadings.
The law was clear about one thing. If a mighty newspaper published a defamatory statement, the onus was on the newspaper to prove what it said was correct.
Mr De Rossa will in the witness box tell of his absolute innocence in this matter. The issue in this case was whether Mr De Rossa was the author of the phrase "special activities" and so knew of and benefitted from those things. The damage to him was immediate and terrible.
The Sunday Independent had now come to court not standing over what it wrote. It was for the jury to decide if that was just evasion by a big, cowardly newspaper.