IT is probably safe to say that Fr Kevin Reynolds has had his fill of High Court proceedings.
The priest who was libelled in RTE's Mission to Prey documentary is back in his Galway parish of Ahascragh, vindicated of false allegations that he fathered a child with a minor in Kenya.
However, according to his religious order the Mill Hill Missionaries, Fr Reynolds is scarred by his ordeal.
Six months after the cleric settled his libel action on the steps of the High Court, rumblings of discontent over the debacle are gathering again, amid speculation that issues surrounding the programme could get a second airing in the courts. If they do, it will be with the programme makers, rather than Fr Reynolds, as the aggrieved parties.
The Prime Time Investigates team behind A Mission to Prey have five days left in which to decide what to do about the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland's (BAI) investigation into how the priest was libelled.
Details of the probe were leaked to The Irish Times last week, days after the final report was received by RTE.
According to these leaks, the findings expose the broadcaster's significant failure of managerial and editorial controls and the groupthink mentality of the production team who were convinced their story was true.
The probe was instigated at the request of Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte in the aftermath of RTE's substantial out-of-court settlement and apology to Fr Reynolds late last year.
The BAI commissioned Anna Carragher, a former controller of BBC Northern Ireland, to conduct the inquiry.
A seasoned broadcaster, Carragher was given two months to interview the programme makers, editors and managers, read their written submissions, study their emails and notes and reach her findings.
She delivered her report to the authority's compliance committee, who gave it to the board, which then decided a judgement and penalty. It is reportedly close to the maximum of €250,000 for breach of duty in relation to fairness and privacy.
The final report was issued to RTE last Thursday week.
RTE and the individuals named in Ms Carragher's report were given 14 days to respond.
They can make more submissions, or appeal to the BAI or the High Court. The deadline runs out on Friday. After that, the report will be published.
The protagonists in this protracted and sorry saga include the immediate production team: Ken O'Shea, editor of current affairs when the programme was made; Brian Pairceir, then executive producer of Prime Time Investigates; Mark Lappin, the producer on A Mission to Prey who now works for CNN in London; and the reporter Aoife Kavanagh, a presenter on the flagship Radio 1 Morning Ireland before she was taken off air in the aftermath. RTE's legal department has also questions to answer.
Ed Mulhall, the managing director of news, was identified early on by Tom Savage, the chairman of the BAI, as the man who had last call on the programme.
O'Shea and Mulhall stepped aside from their roles in the fallout.
Mulhall has since retired and some feel he was hard done by. He was in the thick of overseeing one of the biggest broadcasting events of the year -- US President Barack Obama's visit -- on the same day he was required by current affairs to give the all-clear for A Mission to Prey despite a flurry of legal letters and the offer of a paternity test from Fr Reynolds.
O'Shea has since resigned as editor of current affairs and is working for RTE 2. Paircear and Kavanagh have been reassigned to other non-broadcast duties.
Given the severity of the findings, as leaked to The Irish Times last week, with their reputations and -- with the exception of Mulhall -- possibly their jobs at stake, it is not surprising that some of those involved in the programme are said to be weighing up a legal challenge.
All are taking legal advice, according to informed sources. One person involved has engaged a senior counsel.
The National Union of Journalists has also been advising some of the team.
"Some of them feel so aggrieved by it," according to an informed source. And not only with some of Carragher's "assumptions", as the source put it. It is also a serious bone of contention that they are being offered the opportunity to respond to a report that is already done and dusted.
It is not clear, for instance, how any submissions the programme makers might wish to make in their defence would be incorporated into the final product at this stage. Would their version simply be tacked on at the end?
Aoife Kavanagh, for one, is believed to be contesting the depiction of her role in the broadcast. As the frontline reporter, she got the story, conducted the interviews and responded to Fr Reynolds' solicitors when they fired off warning letters to RTE.
By her own account, the sensational story that Fr Reynolds had fathered a child was conveyed to her by a "very credible third-party source".
The source provided what we now know as false information that Fr Reynolds had a sex with a minor called Veneranda while he was a teacher in Nairobi, and she gave birth to a daughter called Sheila.
Mother and daughter confirmed the story. Kavanagh told Fr Reynolds' bishop in Kenya that she had "very credible information" that Fr Reynolds paid the girl's school fees.
According to the leaks last week, Carragher found that neither the production team nor the editorial chain sufficiently interrogated the credibility of the primary source.
The source had claimed that Fr Reynolds' colleagues were all aware of the allegation.
None of them appeared to have been questioned by the production team, she found.
The lack of scrutiny and challenge within the department led to a "groupthink" mentality where the production team was convinced that the facts verified their assumption, and believed that Fr Reynold's offer of a paternity test was a tactic to scupper the programme.
The note-taking fell short of what should have been expected and interviews with significant sources were not documented.
No training was provided to Kavanagh on A Mission to Prey, which was her first Prime Time Investigates programme, although she is an experienced journalist.
Carragher found it highly undesirable that Kavanagh should have been the point of contact with Fr Reynolds' solicitors and surprising that RTE's lawyers only became involved just two weeks before the broadcast.
One letter, received by the production team on the day of broadcast, was not forwarded to the legal department.
Carragher ultimately blamed a significant failure of management and editorial controls in the station.
Her investigation stops on May 23, 2011, the day the report was broadcast.
The subsequent mishandling of the libel aftermath -- which fuelled the calls for an investigation -- the delay in securing the paternity test, the delay in informing Fr Reynolds of the result, the hurried on-air apology, the attitude that "rolled heads don't learn anything" -- was outside her remit.
The fate of the Prime Time Investigates team is in the hands of yet another RTE inquiry team, this one chaired by Maurice Hayes, a former senator. Its remit is to consider what, if any, consequences those involved in the programme should face.
Some critics believe RTE has been taking pre-emptive action, issuing new guidelines and announcing personnel changes before it even received the BAI's report.
One source last week compared the leak -- of briefing notes for the BAI's board -- to a "controlled explosion".
The leak has also given the State broadcaster opportunity to point the finger right back at the authority, charged with investigating standards at RTE.
According to one source, levels of paranoia at the BAI are "sky high" as a result.
"Whoever leaked it obviously didn't think it through properly because it's a very traceable document. There are only a dozen or so people who have access to it so the loop is very small," said a source.
"Perhaps they could claim they left it lying around where a third party then picked it up. It's comparable to a member of a jury issuing a tweet in the middle of a trial. That's the level of seriousness that we're talking about here."
Fr Reynolds has been kept out of the loop in the BAI inquiry and is still in the dark about the provenance of the allegations.
His solicitor Robert Dore called on RTE to name its credible source.
There were reports that it was a priest who served in Africa, and that was in part why the Prime Time Investigates team gave the claims such weight.
The Mill Hill Missionaries conducted its own inquiries into the allegations when Fr Reynolds first alerted them.
According to Fr Michael Corcoran, the society's regional representative in Ireland, it never got to the bottom of it either.
It was Fr Corcoran's job to instigate the child protection protocols, ultimately leading to Fr Reynolds removal from his parish. The investigations were organised by the society's general council in London.
"At the moment we have no evidence, I have no evidence, the general council in London has no evidence of a priest being the source of that allegation," said Fr Corcoran.
"I would, to be honest, be sickened in the stomach, to use an expression, if that ever came about, that a priest or a colleague would be the source of an allegation that would have brought about what we witnessed in A Mission to Prey," he said.
If it did transpire, they would have to look into it, he said, because "there would be a question of justice there as well".
This weekend, Veneranda Mudi added to the mystery.
From her Nairobi slum, she told the Irish Independent that her words were misinterpreted, misunderstood and miscommunicated by RTE -- a charge which RTE has denied.
Fr Corcoran, who worked in east Africa for 20 years and understands the communication difficulties, said he found it "very difficult to believe" that she did not understand the questions RTE was asking her.
To Fr Corcoran, however, journalistic standards -- not the conflicting stories of an impoverished Kenyan woman -- are at the heart of the Fr Reynolds libel debacle.
"We've had various interactions with journalists from all over the world, including the BBC, because we were living in a war zone for seven or eight years.
"Journalists do good things -- the reporting of injustice, the reporting of what's happening on the ground, and I found that the whole way that this was handled was a great disservice to good journalists who are actually working on the ground, not only in Kenya or Uganda but all over the world," Fr Corcoran said.