IT WAS a week in which Albert Reynolds's daughter, Miriam Fogarty, cried in the witness box and her father said he did not read a single hostile Irish newspaper report of the fall of his government.
It was a week in which the journalist at the centre of the libel trial said that he did not have any notes for the article complained of, and did not talk to Mr Reynolds or any of his ministers.
It was also a week in which the jury heard Mr Reynolds described as "a political bully", "unprincipled", and involved in a "saga of deceit" in newspaper Articles published in Ireland at the same time.
At the beginning of the weeks counsel for the Sunday Times, Mr James Price, had aimed verbal punch after verbal punch at Mr Reynolds, only to have it absorbed by the punch bag of Albert's verbosity.
For two days he took the former Taoiseach through the more controversial moments of his political career, trying to establish that allegations of deceit, attempts to evade responsibility and sleaze had dogged him throughout.
The jury was taken through the intricacies of the beef tribunal, the Masri passport affair and the Harry Whelehan affair which led to the fall of the government.
It was unclear whether Mr Reynolds did not understand the questions, or did not want to answer them, but a simple reply to a straight question seemed to escape him.
Again and again the Sunday Times counsel tried to get Mr Reynolds to agree that Mr Spring said he left the government because Mr Reynolds lied to the Dail on the Tuesday. The answer Mr Reynolds gave each time that he could not know what was in Mr Spring's mind suggested that he understood the question to be about the actual reason for Mr Spring leaving not what was a matter of public record.
Each question prompted a lengthy explanation of all the circumstances surrounding the event in question, sometimes interspersed with chunks of Mr Reynolds's philosophy, embroidered with Shakespearean quotations.
He seemed curiously unaware of the impact he was having on other people, as not only Mr Price but the judge were clearly getting exasperated. His own counsel Lord Williams, was forced to ask him to keep his answers brief and avoid Shakespeare when he started his re examination.
Members of the jury looked numbed, and from time to time one or two put their heads in their hands.
None the less, by Tuesday evening, which marked the end of Mr Reynolds's sixth day in the witness box, it was felt that he had withstood the questioning fairly well. He had held his ground, albeit in his own way, and Mr Price had not seriously breached his verbal defences.
Then came the legal arguments about whether other newspaper articles published the same time could be admitted. They could, said the judge, provided they were not used to back up the Sunday Times one, but as a basis for questions as to why the plaintiff did not sue them.
They were devastating. Mr Price quoted articles from the Sunday Independent, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Tribune and The Irish Times which variously described Mr Reynolds's behaviour during the fall of the government as "a carefully concocted piece of deception", "wanton dereliction", "arrant nonsense" and having lost the "battle for integrity". "I could go on, he said as he finished.
Why did Mr Reynolds not sue? He did not see any of these articles, he was too busy trying to solve the problem to read any papers, and after he resigned too traumatised to read them, came the replies.
The jury will be asked by Mr Price to consider the plausibility of a prime minister who, he earlier told the court, led one of the most successful governments in his country's history, brought about a historical peace agreement and was an intimate of the British Prime Minister, not reading a single newspaper during or alter a major crisis.
By the end of his evidence on Wednesday the former Taoiseach's voice was fading, and the judge had to ask him a number of times to speak up.
Then his daughter, Ms Fogarty, took the witness stand.
Dignified but tearful, she described, in a breaking voice, how upset her father had been by the article, and the strains it had put on her very close family. In particular her mother, who had suffered from cancer, felt the stress.
The jury, which includes five young women, were far more attentive during her evidence.
To the obvious surprise of the Sunday Times legal team, Lords Williams then announced that that concluded his case. A number of Fianna Fail former ministers had been expected to give evidence for Mr Reynolds, but they were now not appearing.
The Sunday Times then opened its defence by calling the author of the article complained of, Mr Alan Ruddock, its Irish editor.
Most of his evidence was given on Thursday, and by the end of it the pendulum had swung back again.
During the course of his evidence he admitted he had no notes for the article in question and he did not speak to Mr Reynolds or to any Fianna Fail minister about it. His main source was, Mr Fergus Finlay, described by Lord Williams as the "spin doctor" of Mr Spring.
Talking to Fianna Fail was the job of another Sunday Times journalist, Vincent Browne, he said, but he rejected his version of events. This was published in the Irish edition but not the English one.
Lord Williams, who up to then had generally confined himself to legal arguments, now went on the offensive. Surely those most concerned about the truth of these events were people living in Ireland, North and South?
It was Mr Ruddock's contention that Mr Reynolds was a liar and had damaged his country's reputation. Yet those readers had never read this. Why? Mr Ruddock spoke of the need for more background in England.
The editor of the Sunday Times, Mr John Moore Witherow, was asked the same question yesterday. He admitted he was unhappy that two editions of the same paper had substantially different versions of the same event.
"With hindsight, the Irish edition should have reflected more closely the English, Scottish and Welsh editions." He was asked why, if he favoured Mr Ruddock's version of events, he did not spike Mr Browne's in the Irish edition. "We had to run something," he replied.
This brought the live evidence to an end, and Mr Reynolds's solicitor, Ms Pamela Cassidy, who appears not to be a woman given to joviality, was smiling broadly.
The plaintiff himself looked tired but happy - especially as, that same morning, Mr Finlay had shocked everyone by going home without giving evidence.