Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I assure the Senator that this is not the purpose of the section. It is designed to prevent a situation where, in theory, a person who takes a defamation action in respect of an article published in The Irish Times, which is read by a certain number of people on the day it is published, decides to take further action four years later when another person who reads the article, which has been left in a hotel room for that length of time, telephones the defamed person to say he or she is angry about the article's contents. Multiple publication is defined as "publication by a person of the same defamatory statement to 2 or more persons ... whether contemporaneously or not". It must be the same statement and the same person doing the publishing. Its purpose is to prevent a person who has taken action in respect of a defamatory statement coming back in the future, having discovered that others have subsequently read it, seeking more compensation because he or she did not foresee such lasting damage to his or her reputation.