Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

Most secretaries who write letters are, unless it is staring them in the face, totally unaware of whether they are defamatory. They assume that their employers are persons of honour and decency and would only put forward observations that are true or whatever. I simply do not believe that a court would award damages of a significant amount against a secretary. Similarly, neither the postman who delivers a letter nor the person who opens it in the place in which it is received would be liable to be held responsible for its publication. If we choose to include various categories of innocent participants, the provision would have to be widened substantially. For example, if I wrote a defamatory letter about the Senator and sent it to Senator Jim Walsh, the latter's secretary would, in a sense, publish it when he or she opened it and placed it on his desk. However, no one would dream of suing Senator Jim Walsh's secretary for publishing the defamation to him. In such circumstances, we would be better off not trying to define a category of innocent participants in defamation. If we started down that road, one would be in a position to write a book on the subject.