Belfast singer takes lack of harmony in stride

NOBODY told Van Morrison there'd be days like this. At any rate, his fiancee, Michelle Rocca, has said repeatedly since the case began that she never wanted her assault charge against former lover Cathal Ryan to end up in court.

So the famously reclusive Belfast singer must be surprised to find himself in the middle of Ireland's biggest celebrity court case of recent times.

But he was there yesterday in the courtroom, listening impassively as Ms Rocca recounted details of her past intimacy with Mr Ryan, an intimacy which she claims came to a violent and abrupt end in a Kildare bedroom in March 1992.

He listened impassively, any discomfort he betrayed being more associated with the seating arrangements. With standing room only at the back of the court, Mr Morrison joined other members of the Rocca family squeezing into the benches occupied by the media corps.

But if he was not feeling the strain, plenty of others were, in a trial which has shone a torch into the bedrooms of Ireland's rich and famous.

There have been light moments in the case, most recently in the evidence of Ms Rocca's "best friend", a fashion company director, Ms Marian Gale, who yesterday gave a cheerful account of the romance between her friend and Mr Ryan: "I thought life between them was a bed of roses and I was going to be selling her a wedding dress."

But this was short-lived relief in the general bitterness of a trial which has featured more than just the falling out of lovers. Betrayed loyalty has become one of the sub-themes of the case, between friends and even between doctors and their patients.

It is one of the minor ironies of the trial that Ms Rocca and a key defence witness share the same doctor. Dr Stephen Murphy examined Ms Rocca the day after the alleged assault and yesterday gave the court a meticulous account of the various haematomas, lacerations and bruises he found on her body.

But what upset the defence lawyers was an extended part of his testimony, in which he referred to a conversation he had with a vital witness, a hairdresser, Mr David Marshall.

Mr Marshall has yet to give evidence, but it is by now well established that he was occupying a second bed in the room in which Mr Ryan and a female friend were sleeping on the night of the disputed incidents.

His testimony has been flagged by the defence as presenting a very different account of the incident to Ms Rocca's. But yesterday, Dr Murphy referred to a social meeting with Mr Marshall in which the latter allegedly gave another version: in short, he had opened "one eye" on the night in question after being wakened by the noise and - seeing what was happening - closed it again and pretended to be asleep until the incident passed.

Although the claimed conversation happened soon after the incident, Dr Murphy admitted that it was only after the start of the trial that he had passed the information to Ms Rocca's legal team. He said he did this because he was "surprised" to hear the line Mr Marshall's testimony was to take.

The meeting, he claimed, had been at Dublin's Riverview Club where both men played tennis. But an angry Mr Garrett Cooney, counsel for Mr Ryan, retorted that Mr Marshall's evidence would be that the men had never met socially.

Any conversations they had had were in the doctor's surgery and were covered by doctor-patient privilege, "a disgraceful breach" of which Dr Murphy now stood accused.

Furthermore, they would say the conversation described had never occurred anyway. They would claim instead that there had been an exchange in which the hairdresser told the doctor: "Michelle has no case."

Mr Marshall's evidence is eagerly awaited, but so is that of Ms June Moloney, hostess of the party at which Ms Rocca's nose was broken. In the plaintiff's opening testimony, she described Ms Moloney as a good friend. But soon afterwards, and then repeatedly, she recanted this description and has since prefaced remarks about their friendship with bitter qualifications.

Ms Moloney, who was subpoenaed by prosecution lawyers but not called by them, has been in court all week. She has not spoken but has been one of the most expressive people in the courtroom: reacting to Ms Rocca's testimony with a wide range of silent facial gestures, all on the general theme of disbelief.

The defendant's father, Dr Tony Ryan, has not been in court this week, but he has featured in Ms Rocca's evidence as a benign and paternal presence: from bringing flowers in the aftermath of the incident at Blackhall to being at the end of a telephone whenever she has had problems with her daughter, Claudia. On the visit with flowers, Ms Rocca recalled, Dr Ryan had assured her he "always wanted Claudia to be a Ryan".

But the evidence has rarely been so harmonious. In another part of his testimony, Dr Murphy talked of three meetings he arranged with Mr Ryan to discuss a possible reconciliation between him and Ms Rocca.

On one occasion, he had arranged to meet him at the Druid's Chair pub in Killiney, but Mr Ryan understood they were meeting at the Punch Bowl in Booterstown, so they missed each other. The detail summed up three days of evidence in which the two versions of the story seldom met.