IT WAS the same courtroom and the same judge. So it was perhaps understandable that observers not given to bad puns found themselves referring to "De Rocca" when the Minister for Social Welfare's libel action against Independent Newspapers got under way yesterday.
Exchanges in the case threaten to be bitter - the newspaper group was more than once characterised as a "bully" in the opening statements - but the similarities with the Rocca Ryan trial end there. This time the alleged assault was a verbal one and the scene was not a stud farm in Kildare, but the back page of the Sunday Independent in December 1992.
Counsel for Proinsias de Rossa, Mr Adrian Hardiman, reminded everybody that the case had already occupied eight days at the High Court last November. But for the benefit of the new jury, he detailed again Mr De Rossa's life, from humble roots in Dublin's inner city to his present eminence as leader of one of the three parties in Government.
It could almost have been the first speech of this year's election campaign, the imminence of which may have explained the relatively light turn out of Democratic Left candidates in the courtroom yesterday. Joe Sherlock turned up in the morning and Liz McManus in the afternoon, but at least the party leader's special adviser, Rosheen Callender, was there all day.
Mr De Rossa listened stoically to his life story from the back of the court.
For an hour and a quarter Mr Hardiman praised his client and assailed the "mighty" newspaper which he claimed had set out to destroy his reputation. He described the strongly nationalist background which drove Mr De Rossa into the IBA in the 1950s. Since then, he said, his career had been characterised by opposition to violence and a passion for leading others away from it.
Leaving the Workers' Party "in the manner of Eamon de Valera leaving Sinn Fein," Mr De Rossa had taken six of its seven TDs and 80 per cent of its membership into the new Democratic Left and, by 1992, to the brink of government.
But the article by the Sunday Independent, Eamon Dunphy had been motivated by "sheer malice" to thwart the involvement of the party in the government then being negotiated. This was based, Mr Hardiman added, on a "bogus" letter seeking funds from Moscow, which was used to link Mr De Rossa to a series of appalling crimes, including armed robbery prostitution and drug dealing.
There was much emphasis on a change in the defence's pleadings since the first hearing: they would now say that Mr De Rossa signed the Moscow letter but did not sign it "knowingly".
Such logic belonged to Alice in Wonderland, he suggested: "Did he sign it while sleeping? Did someone slip it in with his ESB bills?" he asked, causing Liz McManus to grin like a Cheshire Cat. The "fecund mind" of Independent Newspapers had come up with this line of thinking, which was not worthy of a "nine year old child," Mr Hardiman added.
There are no nine year old children on the jury, but lest there be any confusion on this point, Mr Justice Moriarty sent them away yesterday evening with the assurance: "You are all adults."
He was speaking in the context of a promise that he would make no "silly" demands on them to avoid radio or television lest they hear something about the case. The evidence should determine their verdict and nothing else, he said. He might have added, as the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland put it take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.
