MR REYNOLDS should be awarded "massive" damages for being described as a liar by the Sunday Times, Lord Williams told the jury.
The "anger and distress" that Mr Reynolds felt after reading the article had never left him, Lord Williams said.
"When he walks into a room he still doesn't know who has read it and still doesn't know what they think about it... He is here to ask you, a jury in London, for a verdict in his favour. He asked the Sunday Times to say sorry and they refused.
"You are powerful people, yet you cannot make the Sunday Times say sorry. You have only the power of awarding damages to him. The elements in assessing damages, I suggest, should include the fact that Mr Reynolds served the public well, and not just the public in the Irish Republic.
"Damages should be massive for injury to his reputation, to vindicate him. In other words, he wants a flag to go away with from here to say I went before a jury, 12 men and women; they assessed me and gave me damages," he said.
Concluding his opening speech, Lord Williams compared and contrasted the Sunday Times article printed in the Irish editions with the allegedly libelous version in the English, Scottish and Welsh editions.
Reading to the jury the Irish article, with its headline "House of Cards" and a side-bar. "What do you call a northsider without an anorak? Taoiseach?", Lord Williams said Mr Reynolds agreed that this article was an acceptable description of the downfall of his government.
"Albert Reynolds has no real complaint against the Irish edition. He says that, by and large, it was fair and, by and large, that it was accurate," he said. Lord Williams pointed out that in its Irish article, the Sunday Times conceded that Mr Reynolds never saw a letter from the Attorney General, Mr Eoghan Fitzsimons, detailing the Duggan case before he addressed the Dail on the delays in the extradition of the paedophile priest, Brendan Smyth.
"You may well be asking yourselves why the Sunday Times did not put this in the English edition. That it was a mess, that there was a lack of direction. They didn't put that at all. They called him a liar," he said.
Lord Williams then read aloud several letters from Mr Reynolds's solicitors to the Sunday Times requesting an apology and damages, and asking why the paper had chosen to print a different article by the same journalist, in Ireland.
"Their reply was that a longer and more detailed analysis, of three to four pages, was written for an audience for whom the events in question are much more immediate and topical of interest.
"What is the word I am looking for? Humbug! What are they trying to say? That the readers in Ireland are entitled to the truth, whilst readers in England don't know enough about the events, so they publish lies?" he asked.