Dr. Roderick Flynn:

They are certainly far more defined by it. I remember 20 years ago in the school of communications in DCU we all thought that our new students were going to be digital natives and they would know more than us about media. This turned out not to be true. Ironically, the more invisible the interface became, the less understanding there was of what lay behind it. They do not see the code, as it were. That is where they live. They live online.

As for defamation laws, they are chilling. We have external European Court of Justice confirmation of this. The Independent Newspapers v. Monica Leech case took eight years to finally get to the European Court of Justice. The court came back and said that Irish defamation laws, as they stood, were a problem because there is essentially no limit on the amount that might be awarded in the case of a successful defamation action. The single largest defamation action in Ireland actually does not relate to a newspaper but the Leech case was interesting. I think the original award was €1.25 million, or was it even more? Was it knocked down to €1.25 million by the Supreme Court? It might have started at €1.75 million. That is enough to close some newspapers. Certainly if it was a regional title, that would be the case.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about this. There are some fairly obvious recommendations that it should be entirely taken out of the responsibility of a jury to make this allocation and that it should be left to judges. There has been some improvement in that judges now make recommendations to juries about the appropriate level of an award. It would appear to me that the only sane way forward is to leave it entirely to judges and to have a very clearly defined set of criteria about how much can be paid out.