We wanted to know if it was libellous to call someone a brat. Legal brains pondered the matter. The conclusion eventually was that when applied to Patrick Gallagher, who died last week, it was a fair and accurate description. We could proceed.
It was March 1982, and it had been the then features editor Colm Tóibín's idea to plaster the headline "Patrick Gallagher, Property Speculator and Brat" across the cover of In Dublin magazine. I was writing the article, a sorry tale of Gallagher's destruction of swathes of the city, but it was the headline which made the impact.
Patrick Gallagher had declined to be interviewed for the piece, but afterwards decided he did want to talk to me. I was summoned to a surreal evening in one of the large snugs of Ryan's in Parkgate Street, where Gallagher was ensconced with business cronies and family members.
Between sessions of climbing on tables and singing loudly, he wanted to know why we had called him a brat. He wasn't a brat, he said, and wanted us to take it back. Since he then immediately burst into song again, it was difficult to take him seriously.
However, there was nothing surreal about what Patrick Gallagher was doing to the capital city. Then just 30 years old, he had used it as his personal playground for the previous eight years and he was one of those children who liked smashing their toys.
The story of the Gallagher family is a parable of modern Ireland. The patriarch Matt was one of the great financial backers of Fianna Fáil. From rural stock in Sligo, he was one of the great wave of emigrants to the building sites of Britain during the 1940s.
He returned in the late 1950s, with enough money to capitalise on the nascent building boom, as Ireland under Seán Lemass began to open up the economy.
Matt built homes for the emerging middle classes, developing the Gallagher Group into the largest house-builders in the land. Hand and glove with Fianna Fáil, he constructed whole suburbs. There was an absolute belief that what was good for business was good for the country, which in turn was good for Fianna Fáil.
It was a small world. Des Traynor, infamous now as Charles Haughey's accountant, was a director of the Gallagher Group. The seeds of subsequent scandals were already there, with the ownership of the company transferred in the early 1960s to an impenetrable parent company registered off-shore in the Cayman Islands.
But where Matt's business was to build, his son Patrick preferred to destroy. On the death of his father in 1974, Patrick radically shifted direction. The oil crisis was biting and recession was on the way.
Cynical and hard-headed, Patrick sold off swathes of the Gallagher land bank in what he called "the less prestigious areas". He scaled down the building operation and concentrated on the wealthier end of the market.
"We felt that in any recession there were people who would make it through," he explained. "This time they were the civil servants, the accountants, airline people and so on. We simply catered for them."
It was not long, though, before Patrick realised that you didn't need to actually build anything at all in order to make money. You could buy city centre sites, demolish the fusty old buildings and sell them on. Never mind that rubble and years of dereliction replaced several of the finest examples anywhere of 19th century architecture.
As Patrick played Monopoly with Dublin streets, making vast money and flaunting it ostentatiously, it later transpired that he had also been engaging in extensive fraud. The Gallagher Group had over-extended itself in May 1982, the banks foreclosed and everything went bust.
Liquidator Paddy Shortall was appointed to examine the affairs of Merchant Banking Ltd, a Gallagher-owned bank. He discovered a series of apparently fraudulent transactions involving Patrick's use of depositors' savings to prop up his speculative empire.
The liquidator identified evidence for a total of 79 possible criminal offences under six different acts. It has always remained one of the great mysteries as to why Gallagher was never even prosecuted, let alone found guilty, for any of these.
The authorities in Northern Ireland, where he had a branch of his bank, did pursue him and locked him up for two years. However, his Northern operation constituted only a fraction of his activities.
Given the scale of Gallagher's apparent fraud, he must have been convinced that he was untouchable, that the normal rules and laws simply did not apply to him. It is likely that such a belief was bolstered by his close connections to the then taoiseach Charles Haughey. After kindly providing him with an enormous gift of £300,000, Gallagher could be forgiven for believing he had the power of the land in his pocket.
There has been much talk this past week in the wake of Patrick Gallagher's untimely death of Greek tragedy, of Icarus and his burning wings. The more mundane truth is that Gallagher was a wide boy with powerful friends, who in this country never had to pay for his crimes.