Though it may require a considerable stretch of the imagination, suppose for a moment that Beverley Cooper-Flynn's evidence at her libel trial had been the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

She really didn't encourage any of her clients at National Irish Bank to evade tax. Through some unfortunate combination of mistakes and malice, RTE had fingered the wrong woman. A decent, honest politician had been unfairly exposed to hatred, ridicule and contempt. A bright future which might well have ended in the holding of some of the highest offices in the land had been wrongly tarnished.

In those circumstances, as Mr Justice Morris put it in his ruling on costs on Thursday, "since she is a member of Dail Eireann and was a member of the Public Accounts Committee, she was left with little alternative but to appropriately react to the allegations". In other words, she had to sue RTE for libel. That, as the same ruling brought home with unmistakable clarity, meant risking everything.

In order to uphold her constitutional right to her good name, she had to risk as much money as she could reasonably expect to earn in a lifetime. In order to save her political future, she had to risk losing her Dail seat through bankruptcy.

The public is by now familiar with media criticisms of the libel laws. The case which journalists make, based on the right of free expression and the public right to know, can often be dismissed as special pleading since journalists have a vested interest in reform. The point which is often lost, and which emerges so clearly from the Cooper-Flynn case, is that the current libel laws don't work for the plaintiffs either.

Suppose, again, that Ms Cooper-Flynn really had been libelled by RTE news and that the station realised it could not stand over the allegations it had made against her. The obvious and decent thing to do in those circumstances would be to broadcast a grovelling apology and retraction on the following evening's news.

The problem is that RTE would then have been in a no-win situation. If the apology acknowledged that the allegations were false, Ms Cooper-Flynn could go ahead with her libel case anyway, knowing that RTE now had no defence. If it didn't, that very failure would itself almost certainly add to the damages to which she would be entitled.

Paradoxically, laws which are meant to protect people from false accusations actually make it far more difficult to get damaging allegations withdrawn. So much is at stake that the common-sense solution is often the most problematic.

The law also means that the size of one's bank balance is far more important than the justice of one's case. Even for a well-paid banker-turned-politician, with a father who famously boasted of his three houses, the financial risks of going to court are enormous. For those without resources, they are simply prohibitive. The system is so costly, so cumbersome and so protracted that for most people the constitutional right to defend one's good name is merely theoretical.

EVEN when you win, moreover, the emotional cost of taking the case may not be matched by the triumph of vindication. Ms Cooper-Flynn's is the third high-profile political libel trial in recent years. In the other two cases, taken by Albert Reynolds and Proinsias De Rossa, the juries found that the politicians had indeed been libelled.

In each case, however, the act of vindication was astonishingly tortuous. Mr Reynolds was famously awarded just a penny damages against the Sunday Times and had to go into a byzantine process of appeals. Mr De Rossa got his victory over the Sunday Independent only after three trials, with the costs and the risks mounting at every bizarre turn of events.

Very few people, even in the media, would contend that freedom of expression should be absolute, that false allegations cannot do immense harm to an individual, or that journalists should not be accountable for abuses of their considerable power. The Constitution suggests that the right to freedom of expression has to be balanced against the right to one's good name.

In reality, however, the system as it stands, rather than balancing these competing rights, tends to pit them against each other in a never-ending struggle in which both sustain continuous damage.

Almost everyone loses. The public is denied important information while people who are up to no good hide behind a wall of solicitors' letters threatening libel proceedings. The media expend vast resources simply on processing routine and often utterly spurious libel threats - money that should be spent on good reporting. The person who is defamed has to walk a very high wire just to set the record straight. The only people guaranteed to hit the jackpot are the lawyers.

The biggest obstacle to the kind of reforms recommended by the Law Reform Commission has always been that such changes are in the hands of a group which forms one of the principal sources of libel actions - politicians. In their own minds, politicians have tended to regard the notion of voting to reform the libel laws as being on a par with turkeys voting for Christmas.

If nothing else comes out of the sorry saga of the Cooper-Flynn case it may be that politicians will finally understand that this system can inflict disproportionate harm on them as well. Whatever else she deserves for her activities at NIB, a £2 million bill for a court case is collateral damage on a grotesque scale.

In a healthy democracy, she might well be facing the prospect of being thrown out of her party and even of losing her seat because of public opprobrium. That she might eventually end up losing it because one archaic law has made her bankrupt and another prevents bankrupts from sitting in the Dail would be a sad demonstration of what can happen when archaic laws are allowed to fester.

fotoole@irish-times.ie