Mr. Healy's action for libel against the Freeman's Journal" for
accusing him of having Wrongly advised his clients in the Gweedore case to plead guilty of a crime they had never committed, and for repeating Mr. P. M. Fitzgerald's accusa- tion that he had received 21,000 in fees for the Crown to the end that he might give this advice, was heard at Limerick before Mr. Justice Barry on Tuesday and Wednesday, and ended in the jury agreeing that the articles were not fair comments on Mr. Healy's conduct, but in being unable to agree on the damages to which he was entitled, so that they had to be discharged. In cross-examinatipn, Mr. Healy admitted that he had called Lord Spencer the Duke of Sodom and Gomorrah, and said that he was not ashamed of it, and "would do it again under the same circumstances." Naturally the jury could not agree , on the sum to which Mr. Healy was entitled for being -calumniated in language much less violent and coarse, and not more false, than he declared that he had himself applied to others, and that he was not ashamed to have so applied. A man who asks 25,000 damages for statements much less virulent than he himself freely bandies about, is hardly likely -to get it. And Mr. Healy has not got it even from a Limerick jury.
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