Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The purpose of this directive would be to provide protection to individuals and organisations, particularly journalists, whistleblowers, watchdogs and human rights activists, against so-called SLAPP lawsuits. SLAPPs can be described quite simply as privatised censorship. The vast majority of SLAPPs are pursued by wealthy and powerful litigants with the sole purpose to intimidate and silence their critics. They are an abuse of the legal system, an insult to the concept of free speech and freedom of expression and a danger to our democracy. They lack legal merit and once they are presented in court, the vast majority are dismissed. That is not the issue at hand because the damage inflicted by SLAPPs happens a long time before they ever reach the courts. These lawsuits are characterised by lengthy and expensive litigation, crafted solely to drain an individual’s finances, isolate and intimidate them and ultimately silence them. It does that, I have seen it happen and I endorse the points that have been made on developers. I could not believe it the first time I heard of that being used.

I mentioned individuals because in recent years the majority of these lawsuits were directed at individual journalists or activists rather than the organisations they worked for. This is a tactic to isolate them from the automatic legal and financial support they would otherwise be entitled to and to expose them personally to the costs of the cases. The cost of a single court case would bankrupt many small media outlets or human rights organisations and even the larger organisations can only withstand so many. That is before you start talking about the impact it would have on an individual. The financial and legal vulnerabilities of the media sector are well-known and they are exploited in order to suppress stories.

According to research conducted by the Foreign Policy Centre, 73% of investigative journalists in Europe received legal communications as a result of information they had published. Most of these, 71%, had come from corporations or other business entities. We know the courts are favoured by wealthy people and we have seen them used for that purpose in this jurisdiction as well. The defences proposed by the European Commission were dubbed Daphne’s law after the Maltese anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was assassinated by a car bomb on 16 October 2017. At the time of her death she was facing more than 40 lawsuits. In advance of her brutal murder she talked about the impact the cases had on her and how they scared other people off from doing what she was doing. This is not just an issue abroad; these lawsuits are incredibly common in Ireland and are especially damaging to journalists and to human rights groups and activists. We are seeing community-based individuals who have a legitimate reason to be concerned, including in the sector of development. Not all developments are good ones and there are developments that must be opposed. Shutting that opposition down does not improve the built environment or our environment. It is obvious that this is happening.

I was contacted this week by a woman who is facing a SLAPP as a result of her human rights activism in Ireland. Before this case was taken against her she did not know what a SLAPP was. She had never spoken to a solicitor in her life outside of getting a mortgage and then suddenly she was sitting in front of a solicitor who was telling her she might need to sell her house in order to afford the case being taken against her by a powerful public person in this State. She said:

The whole process is deeply shaming, terrifying and very, very isolating...the aim is to exhaust you emotionally and it is powerfully effective. I've already had to get two loans from the credit union just to be told I'll be brought to the high court.

That is happening now to an individual in this country.

This directive would provide for common procedural safeguards in EU member states to protect against these lawsuits. The safeguards would include the early dismissal of proceedings, which the Minister of State has already gone into in his opening comments. This is welcome but, as has been said, it only applies to cases that have a cross-border element. We need to replicate these measures in domestic legislation and we need to do so urgently to protect people in this State from legal harassment by powerful individuals and corporations.

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