THE TALL, leaner figure of Joe O'Reilly strode into the wintry cold of court number six yesterday, took his seat and rested his handcuffs on his knees.
Eighteen months had passed since the humid summer evening when his conviction for murder sparked bedlam in the Four Courts and had seasoned gardaí succumbing to tears.
The entourage that accompanies these high-profile cases was already in place: curious barristers, a battery of journalists and so many onlookers - some of them veterans of last year's 20-day trial - that the press of people stretched to within arm's reach of the bench.
There too was the familiar face of the late Rachel O'Reilly's mother, Rose Callaly, with her husband Jim and children Ann, Declan, Anthony and Paul, and behind them the dead woman's birth family.
Waiting for the judges to arrive, they, like everyone else, stole glances at the man they had last seen in this building. When he laid down his blue folder and stood a little self-consciously to greet his sister, the courtroom fell noticeably quiet.
A stranger to the minutiae of last year's trial would have gleaned little from the day's labyrinthine legal argument, most of it given over to defence counsel Patrick Gageby's elaboration of the grounds for his client's appeal, punctuated by Chief Justice John Murray's incisive and persistent prodding. "Do we need to dwell on this?" he asked at one point.
And at another: "Your legal ground is?" Time and again there was drawn-out discussion of how paragraphs in legal submissions were numbered, or of mismatched photocopies.
"What page are you on, Mr Gageby?"
"18th July, day 18, page three, tab 26, line 10."
Even the protagonists' attention must have wandered. But then O'Reilly would send a reassuring wink his sister's way.
The crowd could almost be heard perking up when Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, for the DPP, dispensed with the legalese in response to the defence argument over whether it had been proved in court that the phone company O2 was a licensed operator. "What person in this country doesn't know that O2 is a phone company?"
Another of Mr Gageby's grounds for appeal was the admissibility in evidence of an e-mail exchange between O'Reilly and his sister Ann on June 9th, 2004. When his turn came, Mr Vaughan Buckley argued that the e-mails established that O'Reilly "absolutely detested" his late wife and that he was having an affair with someone else, and were therefore "highly relevant". When Mr Justice Murray pointed out that the defence argument was not about the content of the e-mails but the "temporal element" - that they were too far removed from the time of the offence - Mr Vaughan Buckley quoted some lines from the e-mails themselves: "Me plus Rachel plus marriage, over," said the prosecution counsel, quoting a line of O'Reilly's. The bench corrected the equation: "Equals over. Yes, equals. Me plus Rachel plus marriage equals over."
And later: "So what did he do? He killed his wife," said Mr Vaughan Buckley, making the first and only reference to the fact that we were here because a woman had been killed. At that, Joe O'Reilly winced. "You're not addressing a jury now," the chief justice reminded counsel.
When Mr Vaughan Buckley finished just before 3pm and the chief justice brought an intense day to a swift end, the Callalys shook hands with gardaí and the prosecution team and discreetly made their way out. O'Reilly stayed on for half an hour to confer with barristers. After he embraced his sister, the prison officers fastened his handcuffs. Again he left the Four Courts through a crush of photographers. For a second time he'll spend Christmas in prison.
