The president of the High Court, Mr Justice Fredrick Morris has told the jury in the Beverley Cooper-Flynn libel action that they should reach their verdict, not on flights of fancy or prejudice but in accordance with common sense. He told them to hold the balance of justice justly between the parties. Mr Justice Morris was addressing the jury at the end of the libel action taken by Ms Cooper-Flynn against RTÉ and retired farmer James Howard. They will begin considering their verdict tomorrow morning.
In the final closing speech to the jury Beverly Cooper-Flynn's SC Gareth Cooney said that the case pitted a single individual against one of the most powerful organisations in the country. He said that RTÉ was defending the action on a falsehood - a falsehood he described as "like the rotten core of an apple, rotten in itself and which taints all material with which it comes in contact".
Mr Cooney said that the defendants had singled out Ms Cooper-Flynn from all other NIB employees because of her name and the family she had come from and levelled the most serious allegations against her. Mr Cooney also said that it was implausible that a person like James Howard had surrendered his nest egg of £83,000 at a meeting in 1993 to a girl in her mid-20s that he had never met before.
Mr Howard had claimed that he had signed on for the CMI personal portfolio at a brief meeting with Beverly Cooper-Flynn at the Balbriggan branch on NIB in May 1993.
