Ms Jessica N? Mhain?n:

-----but we both represent the Anti-SLAPP Network. I cannot stress enough how much we have tried to engage with different media outlets in order to get them to speak to us about SLAPPs, either on or off the record. Deputy Farrell referred to dealing with it internally and even to then highlight it with the Council of Europe platform, and using different methods to highlight this issue. It has been extremely difficult.

I will just go back to the example of the case against Mark Tighe and The Sunday Timesand the case against Mark Tighe and RTÉ. Even though we already know about the case, when we go to RTÉ and ask its lawyers about it, they have completely refused to speak to us about that case. That is just an example. We have very limited hope of getting them to speak about other ongoing cases. We know there are some but we do not know the details so it is very difficult to highlight them.

Deputy Farrell and others mentioned the EU anti-SLAPP directive. We had great hopes in the European anti-SLAPP coalition about the EU directive, but unfortunately it has been extremely watered down in recent weeks by the Council. We are hopeful that when it goes back to the Parliament that there will be some fortifying of the legislation, but we cannot rely on that. That is why we would really like to see SLAPPs being included in the defamation Bill. Although it is worth recognising as well that SLAPPs will use any substantive law in order to bring an abusive case. In the UK, since the defamation legislation was reformed in 2013 we have seen an increase in privacy law being used there as a vehicle for soft cases. It is important that SLAPPs can also use vehicles like copyright, GDPR, and other such vehicles in order to bring legal harassment, so we would hope that a wider anti-SLAPP mechanism would be enacted in order to nip all of those in the bud.