Eoghan Harris’s wife Gwen Halley is sued over Twitter account

Ms Moore, a political correspondent with the Irish Examiner, was already suing Mr Harris over allegedly malicious and defamatory posts on Twitter, as is Belfast Telegraph crime correspondent Allison Morris.

A former senator, Mr Harris was sacked by the Sunday Independent last May after he admitted being involved with other people in the running of a Twitter account under the name of Barbara J Pym.

The newspaper’s editor, Alan English, said the account frequently went beyond what he considered to be fair and reasonable comment.

Twitter suspended several other accounts it believed were linked with the Pym account, including one with the name Dolly White.

Ms Halley later said she was behind the Dolly White account.

She told the Irish Independent yesterday she was responsible for 34 tweets critical of Ms Moore’s coverage of Sinn Féin. Ms Halley said she was “shocked” that she was being sued, that she considered the tweets to be “fair comment” and she would be defending the action.

The case was filed on behalf of Ms Moore by Belfast law firm Phoenix Law on Monday.

Ms Moore has previously said she had to go to counselling and the gardaí following tweets about her on the Pym account.

She said the account sent her sexualised messages about “whether Mary Lou McDonald turned me on, the size of my arse and called me a terrorist”.

Mr Harris, who is terminally ill with cancer, has denied the tweets were misogynistic, ­abusive or defamatory.

He is defending the proceedings against him, claiming the comments were “fair” and “always about politics”.

The Dolly White account was previously mentioned in the High Court last year.

An application was made seeking to compel Twitter to disclose the identities of persons who controlled, used, contributed to and curated the Pym and Dolly White accounts.

Thomas Hogan SC, for Ms Moore and Ms Morris, told the court last November that Mr Harris had said in a sworn statement that he alone was behind the Pym account, and Ms Halley had control of the Dolly White account.

Mr Hogan said this contradicted earlier statements from Mr Harris in which he said other, unnamed persons had contributed to Pym.

In an interview with the Sunday Times last year, Ms Halley, who is also a former Sunday Independent journalist, said she used a pseudonym on Twitter to avoid being personally attacked and had named the account after her dog, Dolly.

She said she decided to speak out because her husband had been wrongly accused of making misogynistic attacks using the Pym and Dolly White accounts.

The Dolly White account criticised politicians and journalists she deemed to be “soft” on Sinn Féin, businessman Denis O’Brien and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar.

Ms Halley also insisted her tweets about Ms Moore were never abusive or about her gender.