When Judge Kevin Haugh finished delivering his judgment yesterday there was a brief exchange between him and counsel for Mr Haughey and the State about costs. But no one mentioned any possible challenge to his ruling.
The DPP and the Attorney General will be considering the judgment, and what options are now open to the State, but these may be limited.
The ruling on a stay in the proceedings is not open to an appeal as such, but could be judicially reviewed in the High Court.
There are two grounds on which this could be pursued: whether Judge Haugh, as a Circuit Court judge, had jurisdiction to act as he did, and whether his judgment was, on the facts, a "reasonable" one.
According to one senior counsel, the jurisdiction argument is not likely to run very far, as there is little doubt that Judge Haugh did have the right to put a stay on proceedings in his own court.
The issue of his judgment being a reasonable one carries a very high burden of proof if it is to be overthrown. The DPP would have to prove, not that other judges might come to other conclusions, but that his judgment was an irrational one, not properly based on the facts. This would not be easy.
The implications of this judgment are far-reaching. It means that a judge has now defined the amount of pre-trial publicity that can be so prejudicial that a trial before a jury cannot proceed.
Until now the issue of pre-trial publicity, if it was found by the judge to be a problem, was solved by asking a jury to put it out of its collective mind, or by deferring a trial for a given amount of time. If prejudicial publicity took place during a trial, the jury was discharged and a new one sworn in.
However, it was clear as this case wound its tortuous way through the Circuit Criminal Court that Judge Haugh was very concerned about the impact of the publicity. Although he refused an earlier application for a stay on similar grounds, he showed his anxiety about the issue by proposing a questionnaire for potential jurors, seeking to establish whether they were likely to be unduly influenced.
He said in his earlier judgment that he accepted "that the accused's reputation and standing in the public mind had been significantly damaged," and that he had been exposed to "hatred, ridicule and contempt". However, he also found that much of this publicity did not relate directly to the charges of obstructing the McCracken tribunal.
Yet, as he said yesterday, "I did, however, signal real concern arising from the climate of public opinion, as I had found it to be, as I invited the parties to address me further . . . as to what additional safeguards or procedures, over and above the norm, might be adopted in the matter of selecting a jury." This led to the questionnaire.
This initiative was overturned by three High Court judges in a divisional court but, given that Judge Haugh had already expressed his misgivings, it was inevitable that Mr Haughey's lawyers would come back and try again.
Armed with further examples of what they claimed was prejudicial coverage, this time they convinced Judge Haugh that the damage could not be undone by judicial warnings to the jury.
This could have implications for the coverage of future cases where the individual already has a high profile and is the subject of considerable media exposure, and where a jury is involved.
In certain criminal trials there has been a lot of media coverage of the alleged crimes of the accused, but the most serious of these are tried in the Special Criminal Court, where there is no jury. Judges are generally held to be impervious to the influence of the media.
The judgment also has serious implications for the Tanaiste and, more broadly, for relations between the judiciary and the Government.
It was impossible to find anyone in the Law Library yesterday who had ever before heard a senior member of the government being singled out for criticism like this by a judge. Inevitably, she will be asked to bear the burden of the blame for prejudicial comment, and for allowing Mr Haughey to escape trial.