A scant fortnight earlier, Christy Moore had launched a new album, Ordinary Man, which had gone straight to the top of the charts.

'Delerium Tremens' . . . the song that famously pitched Alice Glenn and the Guinness surfers into the same nightmare . . . was the first single cut from the album and that, too, was hanging round the higher echelons of the charts.

But it was the B-side of that single . . . one of the tracks from the album . . . that brought Christy Moore to court on that August day.

'They Never Came Home' was a protest song about the way the relatives of the Stardust victims had been treated by a slow-moving legal system and an indifferent administration.

At a time when Christy Moore was the anti-establishment, the song damned the authorities with savage lyrics like "One law favours the rich or so it appears/ A woman still waits for her kids to come home/ Injustice breeds anger and that's what's been done."

But it was another of the song's lines that was dissected in the High Court. Stardust owner Eamonn Butterly was seeking an injunction against Moore on the basis of this couplet: "Hundreds of children and injured and maimed/ And all just because the fire exits were chained."

The Stardust inquiry of the previous year had found that the fire exits were chained and to the defendants . . .

Moore, WEA Records, producer Donal Lunny and studio owner Nicky Ryan (now Enya's manager) . . . the case looked like a no-brainer.

But in spite of an eloquent defence mounted by Sean McBride . . . then well into his eighties and in one of his last appearances in the High Court . . . Justice Frank Murphy found for the plaintiff.

The contentious word was "all" and, said the judge, the Stardust fatalities and injuries were not solely due to the chained fire exits.

He ordered both album and single to be withdrawn and the song re-recorded without the word "all" in the contentious line.

Moore, though, opted instead to write a whole new song about "the perceived state execution of the first song". "Many people felt that the second song was more powerful than the first, " the singer told the Sunday Tribune this weekend.

He remembers feeling "shocked" when summoned to court: "I was quite intimidated by the whole thing and quite scared by it.

I got the feeling that the judge didn't like me one bit and he made it very clear in court."

But Moore wasn't without his fans that day. Outside the Four Courts, relatives of the Stardust victims gathered to support him . . . "that was one of the great feelings of my life, because I honestly didn't know how they'd feel about me using their stories" . . . and afterwards, they hailed the publicity surrounding the case as a victory of sorts.

More than 20 years later, Moore is inclined to share that view. "I think it probably did re-focus, in some oblique way, on the injustices the families had faced , , and still face. I just have this innate sense that there was a lot of brushing under the carpet.

I think the light has to be let in."