With the coming into force of the new Defamation Act on 1 January 2014 it remains to be seen whether the Government has scored an economic own goal in relation to the requirement that a company will have to establish “serious financial loss” in order to be entitled to protect the reputational integrity of a brand or product. Continue reading
The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog
Category: Ireland (Page 5 of 8)
In 2012 the Irish Courts found themselves tangled in a jurisdictional web. The case of Coleman v MGN ([2012] IESC 20) started out somewhat like this: Mr Coleman woke up one day in 2003, only to discover that his face was portrayed in the Daily Mirror (UK) next to an article about hooligans and drunkards. Distraught by the implications of the publication, he sought damages inter alia for defamation, negligence and breach of contract. Continue reading
The image, right, shows the result of a poll on The Journal.ie which ran last Tuesday: the question was whether Ireland follow the UK’s lead in blocking online porn? And the results show a slight majority (54%) against doing so. This comes in the wake of proposals from UK Prime Minister David Cameron to compel internet service providers to block pornographic material by default. Continue reading
Article 34.1 of the Constitution provides that “Justice … shall be administered in public“. By way of footnote to my earlier post on Open justice and access to court documents comes the decision of Hogan J in Allied Irish Bank plc v Tracey (No 2) [2013] IEHC 242 (21 March 2013). The applicant had been mentioned in affidavits filed by the defendant in the main action, and took this motion to have access to those affidavits. Continue reading
Case Law, Ireland: McKeogh v John Doe 1 (No.2), Facebook, Google and mandatory take down injunctions
In November 2011, Eoin McKeogh was falsely branded as a thief on YouTube, Google, Facebook and a number of websites. This was the result of a video and accompanying material which wrongly identified him as a man leaving a taxi without paying the fare in Monkstown, Dublin. Mr Keogh has, since that date, made great efforts to remove this material from the internet. Continue reading
On 14 February 2013, a Irish High Court jury awarded defamation damages of €150,000 to billionaire businessman Denis O’Brien (pictured) in a claim against the Irish Daily Mail. The jury rejected the defence of honest opinion, finding that the article was not based on fact and was not in the public interest. Continue reading
In writing his Inforrm post on the basis of a speculative report in a Sunday newspaper, Dr Eoin O’Dell was not to know that a Complaint had in fact already been lodged with the Press Ombudsman on behalf of the former Taoiseach, Mr Brian Cowen. Dr O’Dell’s comments were made while the matter was still the subject of an ongoing adjudication process which has the full support of the newspaper industry. Neither I nor Michael Kealey, the lawyer for the Irish Mail on Sunday, had been in a position to comment at the time in respect for the Ombudsman’s understandable preference that confidentiality be maintained during the initial stages of a complaints procedure aimed at encouraging a “mediated” solution in the first instance. Continue reading
The image is a thumbnail of an apology printed in yesterday’s Irish Mail on Sunday; click through for a full-size twitpic by David Cochrane. It is headed “Brian Cowen”, and it consists of four paragraph. The first paragraph (which consists of a single sentence) begins by referring to their story of Cowen’s attendance at the Executive Education Programme at Stanford University which has been the subject of three earlier posts (here, here and here) on this blog, speculating as to the strength of Cowen’s possible complaint to the Press Council of Ireland and the Office of the Press Ombudsman that article invaded his privacy. Continue reading
This image, by Corey Seeman on Flickr, is the Monument to your Future Collaborators, on the pavement outside the Knight Management Center in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where Brian Cowen attended the Executive Education Programme last Summer. Cowen probably walked past it, if not over it, several times. Continue reading
As reported on Inforrm ex-Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, Brian Cowen, is potentially pursuing a complaint against The Mail On Sunday for publishing a story about his return to education. Mr Cowen enrolled himself onto a US$58,000 Executive Program (for ‘senior executives‘) at Stanford University. Dr. O’Dell makes a very persuasive prediction that the complaint would not be upheld by the Press Ombudsman or the Press Council of Ireland because of the public interest in the story due to Mr. Cowen’s status as a public figure, and the fact that photographs were taken of him on the University Campus which is a public place. Continue reading
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