THE QUESTION of who pays the legal costs of the libel action taken by Mr Proinsias De Rossa, which ended with the jury disagreeing on Thursday, was adjourned by the High Court yesterday.
Counsel for Mr De Rossa and the Sunday Independent asked Mr Justice Moriarty to put back the costs issue until a future date.
The action itself has been adjourned until the next court list to fix dates for jury actions. That list is not expected to be dealt with until May and it is unlikely that any new trial date would be before the autumn.
Total costs of the 14 day trial and a number of pretrial applications are estimated at £300,000 for each side. The costs issue was adjourned until the next law term, after Easter.
Following an eight day aborted trial last November, costs estimated at nearly £200,000 for beach side for that hearing were awarded against Independent Newspapers.
On Thursday, the jury of nine women and three men failed to reach agreement in the action in which Mr De Rossa sued the Sunday Independent over an article by Mr Eamon Dunphy on December 13th, 1992.
Mr Kevin Feeney SC, for Independent Newspapers, said yesterday that the parties had agreed that the case should appear in the next court list to fix dates.
He added that in no circumstances could it be envisaged in the light of what had occurred that the newspaper could be responsible for the mistrial which had occurred. His instructions were not to make an application for costs at this time but to reserve the application.
Mr Adrian Hardiman SC, for Mr De Rossa, said he agreed that the case should be put back to the next list to fix dates.
Mr Justice Moriarty said it had occurred to him that what was involved (in relation to costs) potentially involved a very large sum of money and should not be dealt with on a random or ex tempore manner when he had a number of bail applications to deal with that day.
The judge said the matter should be reserved until full arguments about the sizeable sums of money involved could be heard and preferably be adjourned until the next law term.