Former speaker suing over 'dereliction of duty' claims

Former Northern Ireland Assembly speaker John Alderdice launched a legal action today against newspaper allegations that he vanished to buy a holiday home in France amid a deepening crisis in the peace process.

Claims in the Sunday Tribune that he could not be traced amid frantic efforts to stop the Stormont Parliament collapsing likened him to a captain deserting a sinking ship without warning, the High Court in Belfast heard.

Mark Horner QC for Alderdice told a seven-member jury: “It was alleged at a time of crisis he had turned his back, disappeared and went walkabout.

“It was a gross dereliction of public duty if the defendants are to be believed.”

Alderdice is taking the libel action against the Sunday Tribune’s publishers and its former Northern Ireland editor Ed Maloney over articles that appeared in November 2001.

At the time the devolved Assembly and Executive were in disarray as Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble battled to be re-elected First Minister following a six-week suspension.

With hard-liners defecting from his party he was faced with an uphill task to get enough unionist backing for the cross-community voting system.

With a midnight Saturday, November 3, deadline for successfully returning Mr Trimble before possible and unwanted new elections to the 108-member body, attempts at the time focused on realigning the centre ground Alliance party as unionists to achieve the majority needed.

Any such arrangements were thought to have required the Assembly to be recalled from a recess by that Friday, but according to Mr Horner the newspaper article alleged Alderdice had refused to co-operate when an earlier sitting was suggested to allow time for Alliance to make the switch.

Amid desperate attempts to make the breakthrough in time the court was told how the newspaper article alleged he had left for an undisclosed destination in France and switched his mobile phone off.

But claiming the report was littered with inaccuracies, Mr Horner said Alderdice, who now sits on the Independent Monitoring Commission scrutinising paramilitary ceasefires, had been forced to act to defend a reputation built over decades of public office.

A second article published a week later on November 11 compounded the defamation by alleging “as continental Europe was scoured for signs of John Alderdice…”, the barrister said.

He insisted: “He has never issued libel proceedings before, he’s not some tender flower that’s easily upset.

“Politics is a rough trade, but he had been left with no option.

“He had either to put up or shut up. He would either lie down and let the defendants walk all over him and his hard-won reputation or he would stand up and be counted.

“Lord Alderdice is one person who will stand up and be counted no matter what the circumstances are.”

The court was also told that the former speaker had been contacted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the then Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid, the Attorney General and even Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey during his pre-arranged business trip to sign the deeds for a cottage in France.

Arrangements had already been made with one of his deputies, SDLP member Donovan McClelland to stand in for him during his absence, Mr Horner said.

With the political process in Belfast under intense strain at the time the court heard that Alderdice had refused any attempt to change the rigid rules governing how the Assembly operated.

Mr Horner said: “Lord Alderdice will tell this court he was not going to allow the Secretary of State to bounce the Assembly into doing something unlawful or invalid.

“Of course the Secretary of State was displeased, but rules are rules.”

The barrister also alleged that Mr Maloney made no attempt to contract either Alderdice, his private secretary or the speaker’s office who had been instructed to field all calls over that weekend.

He went on to claim that Mr Maloney had filed his first article from New York on the Friday evening.

“How ironic if it should turn out that Mr Maloney, the Northern Ireland correspondent of the Sunday Tribune should criticise Lord Alderdice for his disappearance when the Northern Ireland peace process was facing its most testing moment when he himself had gone absent without leave.”