Mr. Eamonn Kennedy:

I shall give some background. The current legislation in Ireland is the Defamation Act 2009 which replaced the 1961 Act. Since the foundation of the State there has only been two pieces of legislation that have amended common law defamation. Section 5 of the current Act provides that the Minister for Justice and Equality must commence a review within five years of the passing of the Act so I presume that a review will be announced during the course of this year.

The 2009 Act brought some useful changes. It moved the process along whereby defamation claims could be settled or brought to a conclusion in a much speedier way; it provided for an offer of an ends procedure which is helpful in that regard; and it also allowed for the lodgement of money without an admission of liability which for publishers was a useful change. There has also been a movement towards diffusing the costs, certainly for defamation claims which are significant. In 2008, Oxford University carried out a study that ranked Ireland second in Europe in terms of the cost of dealing with defamation claims and Ireland was a factor of ten times more expensive than the next country ranked third, which was Italy.

There are issues that most publishers would view as problematic. The recent events around the "Saturday Night Show" focused our minds on the issue of opinion and how that is protected in the legal system. I have forwarded a paper to the committee that outlined a number of concerns about how the defence of honest opinion, that is present in the 2009 Act, works in practice and it is something that we would make a submission for a review.

There are probably a number of other issues that could be usefully addressed by making some changes. Countries like Australia and the UK have carried out reviews in the past number of years and we could draw some useful ideas from them, not least being the creation of a statute written in simpler form. Let me give an example. The last Irish Act introduced a defence of fair and reasonable publication in the matter of public interest. Last night I counted that the provision runs to 60 lines of text but its UK equivalent runs to 20 lines and is written in relatively simple language. I can go through the legislation if the committee wishes.