THE editor of the Sunday Times was "not happy" that two different versions of the events leading to the fall of the Fianna Fail/ Labour coalition were published in two editions of the paper.
Mr John Moore Witherow told the High Court in London yesterday on the 10th day of the Reynolds libel trial that he would have preferred if Mr Alan Ruddock's assessment of events had been published in the Irish edition also.
However, Mr Vincent Brownie had been commissioned to write for the Irish edition and he had come to different conclusions.
Mr Albert Reynolds is suing the Sunday Times for an article which appeared in the English edition of the paper on November 20th, 1994, under the heading "Goodbye Gombeen Man". It continued, "How a fib too far proved fatal for Ireland's peacemaker and Mr Fixit."
The Sunday Times is denying libel, pleading justification and qualified privilege.
Lord Williams QC, counsel for Mr Reynolds, asked Mr Witherow if the explanations given to people in the Republic of Ireland for the fall of the government was "confusion, error and shambles", while people in England, Scotland and Wales were told it was because of lies.
"Crudely, yes," Mr Witherow replied.
"What's crude about it?"
"It's blunt."
"People who live in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were never told that the Irish prime minister was a liar, were they?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because Vincent Browne did not come to that conclusion. I'm not happy about that. I wasn't at the time," Mr Witherow said.
However, he continued, the Sunday Times was not prepared to tell Vincent Browne what to write.
"You didn't have to run it, said Lord Williams. "You've got something really spicy. Why didn't you run that?"
"We commissioned Vincent Browne to write for the Irish edition."
"Why didn't you spike Vincent Browne and put in Alan Ruddock?"
Mr Browne's article had much more detail in it, and Mr Ruddock's was "inappropriate" for an Irish audience because it covered old ground, he said.
Asked why he did not publish Alan Ruddock's conclusions the following week, he said, "The story had moved on."
Lord Williams asked him if anyone who read the two articles side by side would be "troubled".
Mr Witherow said: "I was concerned."
He denied that the English edition had an opposite version to the Irish one, and explained: "The edition for England, Scotland and Wales came to a conclusion and the Irish one sat on the fence."
"So you're not very pleased with Vincent Browne?" Lord Williams asked.
"I was not happy with the two versions," Mr Witherow said.
"Have you written to Mr Browne about that?"
"No."
"You mentioned persons asked to give evidence. Have you asked Mr Browne?"
"No, he's not a defendant."
Earlier, Mr Witherow told the court that editorial conferences on Friday discussed the contents of the forthcoming paper and the "angle" to be given to major stories. Mr Ruddock was present at those conferences, and during that week he had been in touch with him almost daily.
He thought the story of the fall of the government was very important both because of the peace process and because it was a significant foreign story.
He had discussed the story with Mr Ruddock on Friday, and had seen page proofs on Saturday. He had not read the copy for the Irish edition, but had seen the headline and photographs.
He had been following events in Ireland that week as reported in the British media. Mr Ruddock had been asked not only to outline the background but to explain how the government fell. "I think the article by Alain Ruddock did that very well."
Asked by counsel for the Sunday Times, Mr James Price QC, if he was aware that a "different and softer" version had been written by Vincent Browne, he said he was aware the article had "sat on the fence".
Asked if he was unhappy about it, he said he was aware it was "unusual" for two different versions to appear in two different editions. "We discussed it and accepted that Vincent Browne had come to this conclusion by his own reporting.
"We're not a newspaper which tells journalists what to write. We ask them to go out and find out the facts and form a conclusion."
When the paper received a letter of complaint from Mr Reynolds's solicitors he had referred it to their legal department. Together they had decided no apology was warranted.
Attempts had been made to get Mr Spring, Mr Howlin and Mr Fitzsimons to come over as witnesses for the paper, but they had been unsuccessful.
Lord Williams asked him if he would have been aware on Friday that Mr Reynolds's version of events would not have been going into Mr Ruddock's article, and he said "Yes".
"Did you ask him if he had spoken to Mr Reynolds?"
"He said he had tried. If Mr Reynolds had got back to him he would have been included."
He agreed that Mr Reynolds's account of events had been stated in the Dail, and that Mr Ruddock had watched proceedings on television and read the Irish Times report of them.
"You made a conscious decision not to include Mr Reynolds's account," Lord Williams alleged.
"I did not make a conscious decision."
"You did not include a full and accurate account."
"We did within the confines of space.
"The confines of space were your choice, weren't they?"
"Yes."
He said that the account which was published in the English edition was the truth as Mr Ruddock believed it at the time.