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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I have already discussed on this blog the decision of the Irish High Court in Leech v Independent Newspapers [2007] IEHC 223 (27 June 2007) which all but copperfastened the defence of reasonable publication (or responsible journalism in the public interest) to libel actions at Irish law. Now, in Cusson v Quan [2007] ONCA 771 (13 November 2007) (also here), in a case concerning an article in the Ottawa Citizen, the Court of Appeal in Ontario has allowed Canada to begin to get in on the act too. Joe Rayment saw this coming last January (also here). Now battle lines are being drawn, with Andrew Scott weighing in with an excellent post in favour of this development on MediaPal@LSE, and Mark McQueen contributing an equally impressive critique against it. Fagstein says that in Canada, the libel chill is warming slightly (with interesting further links; see also Cavanagh Williams | Editor & Publisher). Two paragraphs of Sharpe JA’s judgment in particular are worth focussing on. …

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