cearta.ie – Page 150 – the Irish for rights

At the second time of asking, and after lengthy debate (which I will analyse in a later post) the Defamation Bill, 2006 finally passed the Seanad [Senate, or Upper House] last night (hat tip, Daithí). The full text of that final debate is now available here.

This is encouraging news, but we have only reached half-time in the long game that is Oireachtas [Parliamentary] procedure. It must now go to the Dáil [Lower House, functionally equivalent to the House of Commons], where the stakes and the profile will be higher. The stakes will be higher because there will be no further opportunity to amend the Bill once it passes. And the profile will be higher because DÃ¡il debates always have a greater impact on the public and media consciousness than do Seanad debates (for example, there is barely a whimper of recognition of the importance of last night’s debate in the mainstream media – apart from the Irish Examiner and the Irish Independent, the Irish Times Seanad Report (sub req’d) discusses an entirely different issue, with the Defamation Bill getting a single sentence near the end, and no mention at all that it had been passed, and there seems to be no mention of it on the RTÉ News website).…

Beware, unintended consequences

11 March, 200825 March, 2009

| 5 Comments

| Blasphemy, Censorship, Defamation, Media and Communications

Daithí has just published a wonderful post on the The strange death of criminal libel?. On the issue of criminal libel, he concludes that the Defamation Bill, 2006, currently receiving its Report and Final Stages in the Seanad even as I write this post,

will without further amendment provide for

* the repeal of the [Defamation Act], 1961 [blogged here] including Part 2 dealing with various criminal offences
* the explicit repeal of â€œthe common law offences of criminal libel, seditious libel and obscene libelâ€?
* no provisions on a new offence of the publication of gravely harmful statements
* no specific mention of blasphemy or blasphemous libel other than the repeal of s 13 (as part of the general repeal) of the 1961 Act (though I think that might mean that, especially in conjunction with the Constitution, blasphemous libel – or blasphemy, indeed – would continue to exist – but see note below on the definition of criminal libel)

And that, I believe, is good news.

I agree; it is thoroughly good news. I agree that the repeal of the 1961 Act and of various of the common law libel offences is a good thing. Moreover, the removal of the proposed replacement offence of publication of gravely harmful statements is an even better thing.…

Appeal overturns food review case

10 March, 200812 October, 2009

| 8 Comments

| Defamation

Under the above headline, the BBC is reporting that “the Court of Appeal [in Northern Ireland] has quashed a controversial libel case, seen as a watershed for press freedom”. As already discussed on this blog (here, here and here) food critics writing restaurant reviews will usually be able to rely on the defence of fair comment. As I noted in an earlier post, the case arose out of a review of a Belfast pizzeria in the Irish News. …

What is a “publication”?

10 March, 200812 March, 2008

| 1 Comment

| Defamation

I’ve just noticed something odd about the Defamation Bill currently before the Seanad, and I’ve been looking at it for so long now that I’m annoyed with myself that I haven’t seen this issue before. I was recently asked a very simple question:

What is a “publication” for the purposes of the Defamation Bill?

Unfortunately, that simple question doesn’t have a simple answer. There is no definition of the word in the interpretation section (section 2) which is odd since by my count the word is used no less than 71 times in the Bill. …

Infamy! Defamation! Haughey!

9 March, 20081 September, 2009

| 3 Comments

| Defamation

Charles J Haughey, from Ireland.com “Infamy! Infamy!” Charlie Haughey (left) (ireland.com | wikipedia) might have said during one of the many political crises he survived, “They’ve all got it in fo’ me!”

I don’t know who told that joke about Haughey,* but it’s been going round in my mind this weekend whilst reading Bruce Arnold’s biography of Charles Haughey (B Arnold Haughey. His Life and Unlucky Deeds (Harper Collins, London, 1993) (Amazon: hbk | pbk)). I’ve been enjoying it immensely; and, in it, I discovered that Haughey, in 1961, as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Justice (Oscar Traynor, whom he was to succeed as Minister after the general election later the same year) had taken the second stage of the Defamation Bill in 1961 (Arnold, p 32). This was one Bill amongst a raft of legislation which had been in preparation in the Department for some time before. Haughey, as Arnold puts it, acted not so much an initiator of these Bills as “a facilitator in putting through the backlog of legislation” (ibid), resulting in a “a valuable process of tidying up and of bringing the law up to date, rather than anything that could be characterised as fundamental social reform” (ibid, p 41); but, in doing so, as Dick Walsh wrote, “he managed to meet the fastidious standards set by the secretary of his Department.…

What are websites for?

9 March, 200815 November, 2010

| 1 Comment

| Airline charges, Consumer, Contract, Defamation

There were interesting stories in the media recently, but I have been unable to find any traces of them on the websites of the relevant organisations. Their websites are rather good, and both organisations are media-savvy and tech-savvy, so the continuing absence of any trace of the stories is, to say the least, quite puzzling.

Update (12 March 2008): The National Consumer Agency (NCA), and National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI), for it is they, have still not added these developments to their website. Below the fold, find details of the tricks they are missing.…

Is email ruining my life? How about yours?

7 March, 200814 March, 2008

| 1 Comment

| Media and Communications

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson (left) developed the code that enabled him to send an e-mail between two computers (on ARPANET) for the first time. Now it is as central to the lives of everyone reading this blog as it is to the modern global economy.

However, a little while ago, I blogged about Nora Ephron’s six stages of email – from infatuation to death – and about Jonathan Zittrain‘s proclamation of the death of email. It seems that for everyone who proclaims death by email, there is another to proclaim the death of email; for everyone who provides survival strategies for email overload, there is another to chart the decline and fall of email.

And now, another pair. While Law21 confidently pronounces on The Last Days of Email, the BBC tells me that E-mail is ruining my life! Some extracts:

… A recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress. And it is expensive, too. One FTSE firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it Â£39m a year. …

… changing the way we communicate changed the way we worked. This technology also has its downside. It’s too easy to write an e-mail and hit the send button.

…

McCulloch v Maryland

6 March, 200814 September, 2020

| 5 Comments

| Law, US Supreme Court

On this day (hat tip: ScotusBlog) in 1819, Chief Justice Marshall (left) delivered the decision of the US Supreme Court in McCulloch v Maryland 17 US (4 Wheat) 316 (1819) (findlaw | Landmark Cases | wikipedia), holding that the US Federal Government had the power to establish the Bank of the United States, and in the process laying down some fundamental constitutional doctrine which underpins many of the world’s constitutions today – not only the US, but the Irish as well. In particular, he asserted that

… we must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding (17 US (4 Wheat) 316, 407 (1819) (Marshall CJ) emphasis in original).

A recent conscious Irish echo of this dictum is to be found in the judgment of Barrington J in Irish Times v Ireland [1998] 1 IR 359, [1998] 2 ILRM 161 (2 April 1998) (doc | pdf) [151], where he asserted that

… it is important to remember that we are construing, not a revenue statute, but a constitution.

The trope that a constitution is not to be interpreted as a revenue statute is a common one. For example, in National Union of Railywaymen v Sullivan [1947] IR 77 (HC) 88 Gavan Duffy J held that a Constitution is “emphatically not to be parsed as if it were an Income Tax Act”; whilst in AG v Paperlink [1984] ILRM 373, 385; [1983] IEHC 1 [45] Costello J said that the Constitution is “a political instrument as well as a legal document and in its interpretation the courts should not place the same significance on differences of language used in two succeeding sub-paragraphs as would, for example be placed on differently drafted sub-sections of a Finance Act” (see also Murray v Ireland [1985] IR 532 (SC) 539 (Costello J)).…