THE Minister of State, Mr Pat Rabbitte, was "crestfallen" when he read the Eamon Dunphy article at the centre of the Proinsias De Rossa libel case, he told the High Court yesterday.
Mr Rabbitte said when he read the Sunday Independent article on the day it appeared in December 1992, he felt it was "curtains" for negotiations on Democratic Left's involvement in government.
He said the article had branded the party leader, Mr De Rossa, "a criminal, a pimp and a drug-pusher".
At the time it was published, Mr Rabbitte and a colleague, Mr Des Geraghty, were representing Democratic Left in talks with Labour about forming a government.
When he saw the headline on the article, "Throwing good money at `jobs' is dishonest", he did not pay much attention to it he told counsel for Mr De Rossa, Mr Adrian Hardiman SC. "I thought it was a pretty typical Sunday Independent view of creating jobs for the unemployed."
Asked by counsel what his reaction was, Mr Rabbitte said: "I was pretty crestfallen about it. As a politician I immediately understood what the implications of it were."
Politicians were sometimes thin-skinned about what was written about them in the media, but this kind of article was "fundamentally serious".
At the time he and Mr Geraghty were negotiating with Mr Brendan Howlin and another Labour Party representative about forming a government.
"When I read that [the article] as far as I was concerned it was curtains."
Mr Hardiman: "Did you connect the article to the negotiations?"
Mr Rabbitte: "Oh yes. That was the significance that struck me about it."
It was only later that he came to think about how one might feel as the person written about in the article. At the time his preoccupation was with the negotiations for government.
"I felt the article was extraordinarily injurious in those circumstances.
"I felt that if the leader of one of the putative parties to partake in a coalition government was being branded a criminal and a pimp and a drug pusher..."
At this point Mr Kevin Feeney SC, for Independent Newspapers, intervened to say there was an objection which he wanted heard in the jury's absence.
After some legal argument, Mr Justice Moriarty called in the jury members to tell them the case would resume on Tuesday and he would let them go until then. The two sides were still embattled in legal argument over the scope of the evidence.
He said a very sizeable element of the case had been concluded with the ending of Mr De Rossa's evidence. No other witnesses would take anywhere near as long.