Following on the success of the Berkman Symposium on blogs and legal scholarship (on which I have already commented on this site), there comes the welcome news of advance plans for a Legal Blogging Conference in London, currently pencilled in for late April/early May. In the meantime, lawyer/bloggers should watch that space. Maybe somebody there will be able to tell me why I’m doing this? …
A Dublin family, the Grays, who moved to Ballybunion, Co Kerry, under the Rural Resettlement Programme, discovered the hard way just how confidential garda (police) records can be (or not). After their nephew had been released from prison, having served a sentence for rape, they took him in for a while. The local gardaà leaked this to the local media, and the wonderful welcoming people of Kerry not only shunned the family, but the public mood turned so nastily against the family that they suffered mental distress, anxiety and personal injury, and eventually had to leave their rural idyll. The Irish Times website reports that, in the High Court today, the family succeeded in their action for invasion of privacy against the state.
As TJ McIntyre points out, this is not the first time that the gardai have leaked information to the press and been found to have invaded privacy as a result. This raises a great number of issues, not only about privacy, but also about freedom of expression, and journalists’ sources.…
Less than 24 hours after yesterday’s entry “We, the People” was written, all seems changed. The morning news cycle is dominated by the headline in the Irish Independent that “Rabbitte leaves door open for Ahern pact“. Now, there may not be as much to the story as the headline makes out, as it wasn’t until he had been “pressed repeatedly on the issue” that Rabbittee acknowledged that he “may” (not would) have to “rethink his strategy if the only likely alternative is to call a second election”.
This seems a terribly grudging concession to incessant questioning.…
.. will soon cost more. Not only are the ongoing hearings on the Broadcasting Bill (mentioned here on Wednesday) likely to result in a broadened definition of television requiring a tv licence fee (even if not so broad that it will catch mobile phones – though it will be interesting to see how effectively this is achieved), but the fee itself is soon to to go up.
Oh joy. …
On the ‘This Week‘ show, on RTE Radio 1 this afternoon, Pat Rabbittee (Leader of Ireland’s Labour Party) artfully danced around presenter Gerald Barry’s questioning about whether Labour will go into coalition with Fianna Fáil after the next general election, expected in early summer. Rabbittee: ‘it won’t arise’; Barry: ‘but if it does?’; Rabbitte: ‘I want Fianna Fáil out’; Barry: ‘but what if?’. And so it goes; and so it went (the full interview is here).
Whatever about Rabbitte’s position now, in my view, if the numbers after the next election are such that the only possible government is a coalition of Fianna Fáil and Labour, then, after the election and the weeks of horsetrading that generate that potential coalition and its programme for goverment, there must be another election, to allow us, the people, to give our imprimatur (or not) to it. …
The Irish Times today carries a report by Jamie Smyth that Germany has proposed an EU ban on holocaust denial and – perhaps – the dissemination of xenophobic statements that could incite violence or hatred. Germany, in common with several other EU states, including France, Belgium and Austria (as David Irving found out), has holocaust denial legislation on its statute books, and legislation against incitement to racial hatred is to be found in countries like Ireland and the UK.
We have been here before (Smyth says that an earlier attempt by Germany in 2004 to get this type of law passed by the Council of Ministers foundered), and this initiative may similarly come to naught. It should. …
Today’s papers carry two stories with interesting freedom of expression angles. Both cases are in their initial stages, with more to come: one returns to the High Court today and the other to the Circuit Criminal Court on Monday week. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that they have to capacity to test the health of freedom of expression and media rights in Ireland today, and it will be interesting to see how they develop.
These two skirmishes presage potential speech battles ahead.…
As a blogging neophyte, I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve my blog both for you (my reader, if there is one), and for me. So, I want to thank John Ryan for today’s entry on blogging tools and information.
I particular like the comment spam protector. …
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