The jibe that broke a staunch friendship
Minister describes ‘good relationship’ before ‘barriers were up’
MINISTER John Paul Phelan reflected wistfully in the High Court this week on his former good relationship with party colleague Senator Paudie Coffey.
The Fine Gael deputy was giving evidence in a defamation trial taken by his old friend against the Kilkenny People, which compared Mr Coffey to an 18th-century highway robber.
Mr Phelan admitted that although they were in the same party, it was in fact he who had come up with the offending term, ‘Crotty the Robber’ to describe Mr Coffey.
Our lives and careers ‘overlapped a lot’
He then sent a press release to the newspaper to this effect.
Although Mr Coffey never raised the issue with him, choosing instead to sue the newspaper for printing his statement, Mr Phelan conceded they had hardly spoken since.
It was once so different, he told the court, describing how their lives and careers had ‘overlapped a lot’.
‘We shared similar interests. We both played hurling, though he was quicker than me. I had two brothers and two sisters. He had two brothers and two sisters. He came from a small farming background, I came from a small business background.
‘We grew up 12 miles apart as the crow flies. I would say we had a good relationship.’ Then, before the 2016 general election, came news of a proposal to bring part of the Kilkenny administrative area into Waterford city. At the time, Mr Coffey was a junior minister at the department of the environment, which was overseeing the issue.
Mr Phelan, who represents the affected area and is now Junior Minister at the Department of Housing with special responsibility for electoral reform, admitted he was ‘apoplectic’.
He wrote the press release with his press adviser, Neans McSweeney, describing Mr Coffey as a ‘daylight robber trying to rob part of Kilkenny’.
Mr Coffey contends the resulting article and headline ‘Coffey the Robber’ caused him to lose his seat in the election. He’s seeking ‘significant damages’.
Mr Phelan cut a confident figure in the witness box. He told the court people from ‘outside’ might not understand what the redrawing of the county boundaries meant for people in his locale. He said he had to try to stop his constituents from ‘going down and blocking the bridge into Waterford’. He said: ‘These were right-minded people.’
Comparing the row to Brexit, he said: ‘Cooperation was out the window and the barriers were up.’ In another press release about the issue, he had said Ferrybank (an area included in the boundary dispute) was not the West Bank, attempting to draw comparisons with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. ‘It clearly wasn’t literal,’ he explained to the court. ‘I mean there were no bombings in Ferrybank or Waterford.’
Earlier in the week, counsel for the Kilkenny People had put it to Mr Coffey that the description of him as ‘Crotty the Robber’ was just part of the rough and tumble of politics.
Rossa Fanning SC said Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is referred to as ‘Vlad’ in the Phoenix magazine and former justice minister John O’Donoghue was known as ‘the Bull McCabe’ after the character in John B Keane’s The Field.
Mr Coffey conceded that former environment minister Alan Kelly had not brought any defamation proceedings, although he was also named in the article as having ‘banded together’ with Mr Coffey to ‘commit daylight robbery’.
Paul Fox, an adviser to Mr Coffey, described his boss’s displeasure at the piece. ‘He just wasn’t very happy. He said it was lies.’ Michael O’Brien, Mr Coffey’s former ministerial driver who described himself as ‘a lifelong friend’, said the article’s effect was ‘frightening, it was not the Paudie Coffey I knew. He went into his shell.’
The trial continues.
People from ‘outside’ might not understand Crotty the Robber, Coffey the ex-TD, and a very big claim for damages IN couRt: MoS report on the case last week. Paudie Coffey is suing over an article in the Kilkenny People that compared him to a highwayman