His stories about National Irish Bank were defining events in Charlie Bird's career. They earned him a Journalist of the Year award, as well as Beverley CooperFlynn's writ. But perhaps more importantly they established him, once and for all, as a serious investigative reporter, helping him shed a lightweight image which had dogged him for much of his 20 years in the trade.
For much of that time, he has played the role of RTE's chief fire brigade-chaser, covering the story of the day, wherever it occurred, in such vague roles as "special correspondent" and, latterly, "chief news reporter".
His very ubiquity endeared him to the public, as did his obvious enthusiasm for the job of breaking news. He has never lost the ability to sound astonished by some of the things he reports.
Even a decade ago, his cult status was sufficient to earn him a cameo role in Roddy Doyle's comic play, Brown Bread. His position as Ireland's best-known journalist was copper-fastened in the early years of the peace process, when the IRA made him its favoured conduit for major announcements - a role dramatically emphasised when the organisation couldn't contact him in February 1996 to say the ceasefire was over.
His very name added to his celebrity, and to the amusement which his reporting style often inspired. But such fame - crowned recently with another cameo in the film When Brendan Met Trudy - had its limitations.
Now just into his 50s, he was anxious to make a more permanent mark, and in the NIB exposes he seemed to find it. In his collaborator George Lee he also found something of an alter ego, a financial expert with a grasp of detail to complement his own broad-brush approach. When they recorded their collaboration in the book Breaking the Bank, Lee did most of the writing. Even before NIB, Charlie Bird's appetite for work was never in doubt.
Cranks and time-wasters are an occupational hazard in journalism, and at the launch of the book he described one wasted day when he waited in vain in a car-park for a contact who had information that would "bring down the government".
He has been known to begin speaking engagements by inviting the audience to write his mobile number down for future reference. The case just ended heard he advertised the number in Cavan's Anglo-Celt newspaper to encourage sources to come forward. Explaining how one complete stranger contacted him, he joked the mobile number was "pinned to every door in the country at that stage".
From a modest background in south Dublin, he failed to distinguish himself at school. He did not pass his Leaving Cert, and giving evidence in the Cooper-Flynn case, he told the court he didn't think he'd passed his Inter Cert either. Third-level education was not an option. But his long climb to media stardom began when he secured a job in The Irish Times library in 1971.
He wrote for Hibernia magazine too, and soon moved on to become a researcher in RTE, a role he filled until he joined the newsroom in 1980.
He was active in radical politics for a time (although "strictly a leafleteer", according to one veteran) and also went through a "gaelgeoir phase," during which he became a frequent visitor to Inisheer and was known for "wearing tweed jackets and smoking a pipe". He still wants to retire to Inisheer, the same source says.
Although he has also struggled to master the second national language, his occasional sins against English have as much to do with his enthusiasm as anything else. "He's a total loose cannon," a friend says. "When he opens his mouth, no one knows what's going to come out, least of all himself. But that's part of what makes him so endearing."
That quality seemed to be in his counsel's mind during the case. As Bird gave evidence with the same nervous energy that fuels his live news broadcasts, Kevin Feeney frequently intervened to head him off from straying into uncharted territory. And yet in 20 years of "front-line journalism", to use his own term, he was able to tell the court he had never previously been sued.