Dr. Michael Foley:

It is well-known in every newsroom in this city who will take action and the sort of thing they will do. They are people with vast amounts of money and they will do this to stop stories about them and their companies. As has been said, journalists phone people to ask for their side of the story, because that is what they are meant to do and because it is the ethical thing for a journalist to do, and, straight away, that is it. Quite often, they try to push it as close to the deadline as possible in the hope that they might get away with it before the people in question can get a lawyer onto the matter but they will have a lawyer and will stop the story. That will go on for a long time. It is not the case that, the next day, they will say they were only joking. It will go on and it will have an incredibly chilling effect on the newsroom. The whole area of anti-SLAPPs provisions is of great importance for journalists and that is why we welcome the fact that such provisions are included in the draft.

On juries, we in the National Union of Journalists, NUJ, supported the use of juries in trials but have changed our policy. The reasons for this change include many of the things Mr. Kealy said about the lack of transparency and the fact that cases can be taken against our own members rather than their organisations, newspapers or television stations. With the decline in full-time employment and the growth of freelance work, our members are out there on their own and might find themselves subject to libel actions. We would not like to see the sort of awards that have been made against newspapers suddenly being made against individuals, our members, who obviously cannot afford them. We have had to change our mind on the whole issue of juries. The halfway house model the Irish Council for Civil Liberties has proposed is something we would probably consider, although we have not done so to date. That might be a good compromise. We have reluctantly moved away from supporting jury trials and have changed our policy. We are a trade union and are meant to be a democracy and we find it very difficult to defend the use of juries any more.