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 Dáil 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).…

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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. …

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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. …

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“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.…

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