THE MINISTER for Social Welfare and counsel for the Sunday Independent have been getting to know each other very well lately, but it still came as a bit of a shock.
"Are we talking about marriage?" asked Proinsias De Rossa, anxious to know where exactly he stood. He was responding to a proposal by Patrick MacEntee - during questioning about the "Moscow Letter" - that when one was dealing with a "suitor," it was common to ask the suitor to "put it in writing".
This in turn followed a suggestion that an earlier letter, sent to the Soviet Communist Party in August 1986 and asking for a meeting during a forthcoming visit - had been a very important part of the "courtship" of Moscow by the Workers' Party.
But Mr De Rossa's insistence that he knew nothing about the August letter caused some tension in his relationship with defence counsel. Mr MacEntee suggested he was being "less than frank" - always a serious accusation for a man called Proinsias - and this in turn brought an angry reaction from the plaintiff. Indeed the judge had to intervene after Mr De Rossa demanded the comment be withdrawn, and the cross-examination was quietly moved on to the Moscow visit itself.
The case has already heard that Mr De Rossa refused to account for his movements when arrested as a young IRA man in the Wicklow Mountains. Yesterday, 37 years later, he was being asked to account for them again. But this time it concerned the 1986 stopovers in the Soviet capital, en route to and from Korea, and this time it was lapse of memory rather than any principle that prevented him doing so in detail.
The exchange coincided with a coughing fit by one juror, and Mr MacEntee also seemed to be finding it hard to swallow as the plaintiff did his best to recall the visit. Had he really been "hanging around as a pure tourist?" Mr MacEntee asked, raising his eyebrows to full mast, "for 10
days?"
Mr De Rossa said he and Sean Garland - his companion on the trip - saw little of each other in Moscow because the latter was "by and large not interested in doing the tourist trail".
Mr MacEntee, who told the court that it was his client's case that Mr Garland was the author of the "Moscow Letter", asked the plaintiff if the letter's preamble represented the Workers' Party's outlook as it then stood. The plaintiff agreed it did, except for references like the one to a five-year development plan when, he said, the party had no such thing.
Mr MacEntee, whose brand of wit is drier than a Free Presbyterian funeral, suggested this might have been cleverly calculated to impress the recipients: "The government of the Soviet Union was very prone to five-year plans".
The day ended with counsel reading the text of Mr De Rossa's December 1992 interview with The Irish Times, conducted after the letter's publication, and challenging the Minister to justify a comment in the interview that criticised the newspaper's handling of the matter.
After a prolonged exchange, Mr MacEntee said he would give him until this morning to think of something. But the judge intervened to say The Irish Times was not on trial. "1 take it you're not seeking to join them to the action, Mr MacEntee."
