When she called former President Mary Robinson "Her Poloness" in a Sunday Independent column it was "just a gentle jibe", Ms Terry Keane said.
Mr Garrett Cooney SC, for Mr John Waters, referred Ms Keane to several columns under the title "The Keane Edge" which appeared in the Sunday Independent over a number of years.
Asked about references to Mary Robinson as "Her Poloness", she said this was a nickname she gave the then President in jest. "She mostly wore polo-necks and she was deified by everybody, and it was a funny remark - it is a pun on polos and holiness."
Earlier Ms Keane said she had worked with the Sunday Independent for 12 years before moving to the Sunday Times. She was given £65,000 "hello money" by the Sunday Times and £50,000 for 48 articles in a two-year contract.
She agreed the public assumed she was associated with the Sunday Independent column but it was an "open secret" in journalistic circles that she was part of a team writing it. Her column in the Sunday Independent had slowly become "bitchy and malicious". "It started off as funny and entertaining, not malicious and pernicious, but it did become that."
She had been uncomfortable with the column in the last few years before she left the Sunday Independent but had very little money.
"When you have very little money, you sometimes have to do the unpleasant job. If I had known I would have cleaned latrines. We have to regret the past, not change it,"
Mr Cooney referred Ms Keane to another Sunday Independent piece about the sex of Bono's child before the singer knew, prior to the birth. She had nothing to do with that piece. Unfortunately, it was under her name and she had to take the heat. She thought the piece was disgusting and objected to it.
Asked what was the difference between the money paid by the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Times, Ms Keane said: "I suppose, after tax, a couple of hundred quid." Pressed further, she said she was paid £1,000 by the Sunday Times and about £750 by the Sunday Independent.
Asked about a piece referring to Sinéad O'Connor's pregnancy and the sex of the baby and if that had been her article, Ms Keane said she certainly had not written it. She was probably living in Kerry then, recovering from a hysterectomy. The article was under her name so she was perfectly happy to take responsibility for it.
Questioned further about the Sunday Independent column, she said she very often found it too "cringe making" to read it.
Ms Keane said Mr Waters had written in The Irish Times that journalists in Middle Abbey Street were lackeys because they referred to Dr A.J.F. O'Reilly and not "Tony." Her point in one column was that was the sort of pretentious, populist rubbish he was going along with. The Irish Times did not refer to its chairman as "Tommy" or "Tommy McDowell." She got the notes on which she based her piece in the Sunday Times from June Levine. She would have phoned back Ms Levine to get part of the quotations from her. Asked what she did with her notes, she said they would probably have been thrown out. Nobody in the Sunday Times asked her for her notes and she had never looked for them.
Ms Keane said she had not asked Ms Levine if Mr Waters had furnished a script of his address. She was using Ms Levine's impressions as a member of the audience and her impressions of the speech. She had no reason to believe Ms Levine had any agenda or that she was lying. Several weeks later, Ms Levine told her that Mr Waters had given a script to Tony Boland, who had attended the Abbey.