Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It has been a remarkable number of weeks and it has been even more remarkable to hear Ministers, the Taoiseach and Government backbenchers downplaying the seriousness of the attempt by Denis O'Brien to silence our media in this State and prevent them from reporting a speech by Deputy Catherine Murphy in this Chamber.

I took a look at the profile Denis O'Brien likes to give to the world. It is a profile from his Digicel Group and it states that he founded Digicel in 2001 and that it operates in the Caribbean and in Haiti, which I will go into in more detail; that he founded the Esat Telecom Group and built it throughout the 1990s until its sale to British Telecom for €2.4 billion; that he chaired the Special Olympics World Summer Games; and that he is a special ambassador for Haiti. That is the image he wishes to project to the world.

In terms of Haiti, Digicel represents the biggest external investment of any company he owns. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was the first democratically elected president of the people of Haiti in 1990. Within a year, he was driven out of office in a coup, backed by the Bush Administration in the United States. He later came back into his country but was forced out again. Throughout that period, the will of the IMF and of Western corporate interests was enforced upon the people of Haiti. They were forced to privatise their resources and to resist policies such as the introduction of a minimum wage and so on, of which Aristide was strongly in support. Then in came the bould Denis O'Brien and he invested in that type of opportunity, created by profoundly anti-democratic practices, following two separate coups which removed a democratically elected president. Yet he was able to present himself as the champion of the people of Haiti when they were impacted by the earthquake.

In Ireland, when he sold Esat to BT and made a fortune out of the sale, he was able to walk away from having to pay capital gains tax by taking up Portuguese residence, and now he is in Malta, but what did we do in Ireland? We made him chairman of the Special Olympics. We had him in front of the world as our moral leader. That is what we have done again and again with Denis O'Brien.

We have a culture of fear in our media, mostly in this city, where people are afraid to utter a word for fear they will have a lawyer's writ on their desk the next morning. It is that culture of fear that made Denis O'Brien believe, having seen the back of people such as Sam Smith and having attempted to silence people such as Elaine Byrne, that he could silence this House. It is no wonder he believed that, because every time he did what he did we promoted him as a goodwill ambassador, a human rights ambassador, a moral leader for our people. I hope that thanks to the decision in the High Court, which was predictable, this is a turning point. How any solicitor could have advised a media company not to report or how the Constitution could be interpreted in any way other than that Dáil privilege is absolute and can be reported upon is remarkable. I hope that we will start to send a clear message to our people. Hundreds and hundreds of families are before the courts in cases involving the repossession of their homes, yet they are reading about Denis O'Brien getting favourable interest rates and being able to purchase Siteserv in the way that it happened while being the wealthiest person in Ireland.

He is wealthier than major international figures, with an estimated €6.8 billion, but he was getting favourable deals as if he was about to go bankrupt. This is what the people at home are sickened about. I hope that all the bullying and intimidation our journalists in this city have been put under can come to an end once and for all and that we can have a true narrative about Mr. Denis O'Brien that his powerful friends would seek not to have. He wishes to portray a profile of his company but, in the fullness of time, his will not be a memory among our people that he would like to it to be. I hope his reign will soon come to an end in this State and that we can have a properly functioning democracy as well as a properly functioning media that feel they can report accurately what happens, hold big business to account and deal with white collar crime in order that we can cleanse ourselves of the culture that has bankrupted and crippled our State and our people.

See this speech in context