The former Minister for Social Welfare, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, was questioned in the High Court yesterday about an interview he gave to a journalist, Mr Eamon Carr, which was published in the Evening Herald five years ago. Mr De Rossa, leader of Democratic Left, and formerly the Workers' Party leader, was being cross-examined by Mr Michael McDowell SC, for Independent Newspapers.
Yesterday was the fifth day of the hearing before Mr Justice Carney and a jury of Mr De Rossa's libel action arising from an article by Mr Eamon Dunphy, published in the Sunday Independent on December 13th, 1992.
The Evening Herald article appeared on March 5th, 1992, which, Mr De Rossa said, was about two weeks after he had resigned from the WP and about two weeks before the founding conference of DL.
Mr De Rossa said the whole thrust of his reply to Mr Carr was not to condemn anybody but to convey that the WP had no association with a paramilitary organisation and was totally against the whole ethos.
He added that he was conveying that it would be grossly unfair to label members of DL who were formerly in the WP or people who had remained in the WP as criminals or Official IRA or anything else.
Mr De Rossa said the interview with Mr Carr had been lengthy. It was clear that what was published in the newspaper was very much a summary of the questions put to him and a summary of the answers he had given. The interview had taken place over half an hour and something like five minutes of what he said was carried in the newspaper.
It was clear the interview was in the context of the debate that had been raging in the WP and in the media for some months previously about divisions in the WP.
He would have been answering questions in that context and in the context of his seeking with others to form another party. He was anxious to convey to Mr Carr that there was no taint of the Official IRA in the WP as far as he was concerned and that any such allegations were untrue.
He was saying that no matter what was alleged about a particular individual, the electorate would have to make up their minds whether or not they accepted individuals who went before them as WP members on the basis of what they knew about them.
In the article, he was conveying that there was no association between the WP and the Official IRA and that it was unfair to label people Official IRA or anything else. The fact that the WP had been damaged was a fact of life.
He was making it clear that he was not accepting there was such a thing as the Official IRA; if it did exist, it had no link with the WP; and that it would not be acceptable to have such a link, if such existed.
Mr McDowell asked about a sentence in the Evening Herald article stating: "If those of us who should have known better can be accused of anything, it's that we were too trusting."
Mr De Rossa said that was in relation to changes he was seeking to make in the WP and the fact that people were organising secretly against the changes and that for too long he and others trusted them to be "up front" in relation to the democracy of the party.