Curse of "Hot Press" strikes back

IT WASN'T the kind of language you expect in the High Court: "Is it true you once phoned Fintan O'Toole and told him to watch his back, that you were going to break his `fucking legs'?"

Even veterans of the Rocca Ryan trial winced as Eamon Dunphy read from an interview he gave to Hot Press magazine last year. He was reading it at the behest of Proinsias De Rossa's counsel, Mr Adrian Hardiman, who had first prepared the way by asking him if he ever boasted of the influence of his Sunday Independent column.

Mr Dunphy had answered "no" and this was also his answer to Hot Press on the question of Mr O'Toole's legs.

What he had said, in the context of a row over an alleged lie the Irish Times journalist told about the Sunday Independent, was: "Fintan, I'm going to fucking have you, baby. Watch the back page next Sunday."

The lengthy answer, read in full by Mr Dunphy, included a claim that he had made Mr O'Toole "a bit of a joke." Having asked him to read it, Mr Hardiman then requoted it, complete with F-words and apologies to the court, and asked the defendant if he had set out to "have" Mr De Rossa in December 1992.

Mr Dunphy pleaded there was no comparison between that article and a case of "petty bitching" between journalists. He had "lowered his guard" and entered into the spirit of the Hot Press interview, and he cited a former Taoiseach, Mr Charles Haughey, as another whom the experience came back to haunt.

Earlier in the day, led through the details of his life by his own counsel, Mr Dunphy described a background which had remarkable echoes of Mr De Rossa's humble origins on Dublin's northside, a truncated education, the importance of getting a trade.

Horror at the violence in the North featured too. Admittedly, the nearest Mr Dunphy got to a flirtation with the physical force tradition was his years as a footballer with Millwall. Where Mr De Rossa was formed by his time in the Curragh internment camp, the defendant was tempered by his years playing in front of Millwall's "ferocious" supporters in a ground Charles Dickens could have named: Cold Blow Lane.

As he described it, Mr Dunphy was a good player but not a very good one. He started out with "dazzling" Manchester United, but never made the first team. By the time his apprenticeship ended, it was clear he was not destined for football's top flight and the rest of his career was played out in divisions three and four.

Even his 23 international games were a qualified success. "Playing for Ireland wasn't such a big deal then. A lot of caps I got were because Johnny Giles didn't turn up." His account of life as a professional footballer - Only a Game? - was born out of the decision to keep a diary, "because I wanted to explore the process of failure."

Mr Dunphy and the plaintiff had socialism in common too, though in the former's case it passed early. He canvassed for the British Labour Party in the early 1960s and agitated for the rights of professional football players, then tied to the £20 maximum wage and very little else. Like the plaintiff too, he had since embarked on a long political journey although, unlike Mr De Rossa's, his went in no particular direction.

Of the disputed article, he said it had been inspired not by the Moscow letter but by the interview Mr De Rossa subsequently gave The Irish Times. Directing his answers at the plaintiff, who sat at the back of the court, he said the interview had been an opportunity to clear up the matter but was instead full of "dissembling" and "trick language".

Stabbing the air with his glasses, Mr Dunphy said the Moscow letter was a case of "history catching up with Mr De Rossa". But then, history and Hot Press interviews have a way of catching up with everybody.