A prosecuting lawyer compared a man accused for murder with the minister for propaganda in Nazi Germany, Josef Goebbels, in the Central Criminal Court yesterday.
Prosecution counsel Mr Patrick Gageby SC, in his summing up of the Joseph Delaney trial, said that like Goebbels, Mr Delaney believed "it was useless to make small lies". He said that "when Joseph Delaney tells lies, he tells whoppers."
Mr Joseph Delaney (53), formerly of La Rochelle, Naas, Co Kildare, has pleaded not guilty to the charge that he, with his son Scott, then 22, murdered Mark Dwyer (23) on or about December 14th 1996.
Mr Delaney has also denied that on the same date at Foster Terrace, Ballybough, Dublin, he falsely imprisoned Mark Dwyer against his will.
At the core of the case, Mr Gageby told the jury, was a conversation between Mr Delaney and Mr Christopher Curry on a mobile phone on the morning of the murder. Mr Delaney is alleged to have said to Mr Curry "The little bastard is dead", referring to Mark Dwyer, and that it was "the hardest thing I ever had to do to leave Scott in the field."
Mr Gageby said: "Only the guilty could say that", and "only a father" would say it had been the "hardest thing" to leave a son lying in a field with a man beaten and shot.
Mr Gageby said Mr Delaney's son Scott had been left in the field to make it look like a revenge killing for the murder of Jock Corbally. Dwyer had allegedly been involved in his murder.
Referring to evidence given against Mr Delaney by his son, Scott, Mr Gageby asked why he would make the evidence up, saying that he had no inducement to do so.
Mr Gageby said evidence given by Mr Scott Delaney and Ms Adrienne McGuinness about the room where Dwyer was beaten had corresponded with the finding of a blood-soaked carpet.
He asked the jury to consider whether or not they believed Mr Delaney's version of events, that he was the "George Mitchell of the Kildare Conference", an "accounts clerk only" and a "good family man."
Mr Gageby reminded the jury of the defence counsel's questioning of Mr Scott Delaney, who said he overheard a masked gunman say to his father "We've got the little bollocks who got your stuff."
Mr Delaney later denied telling his legal team that he had received the phone call from the masked man. Mr Gageby told the jury that it was "unlikely" defence counsel Mr Blaise O'Carroll had "invented" it.
Summing up for the defence, Mr Blaise O'Carroll SC reminded the jury that a key witness, Ms McGuinness, had changed her evidence 16 months after the events and said she had told "blatant lies" with "twists and turns".
Mr O'Carroll said the idea that Mr Delaney had "masterminded" the abduction and murder was "absurd"; that if he were to get "marks out of 10" for his efforts, he would be awarded "one". He said that to organise "something as stupid as abducting Mark Dwyer at a time when Adrienne McGuinness was in the house beggars belief".
Ms McGuinness, he said, had a "vivid imagination" and was a "fearless, venomous creature using her power to put pressure on Joseph Delaney."
It was Scott Delaney, who is currently serving a life sentence for Dwyer's murder, who was responsible for "orchestrating people" to bring Mark Dwyer to the house and out again.
Mr O'Carroll said that none of Mr Delaney's interview statements taken in custody had been signed by him because they were "not an emanation of free will or a free mind" during his "21 hours of interrogation".
Mr Justice Barr will give his directions to the jury today.