David Norris (Independent)

It is honourable of Senator Maurice Hayes to declare his interest in this area. This is a good and appropriate amendment and it is in the interests of the ordinary Joe Soap whose case I have been trying to make here. This amendment is important. If one is libelled or defamed on the front page of a newspaper by the publication of an unpleasant article, an apology for that should be given equal prominence. However, there are certain circumstances where it would be no harm for the newspaper concerned to contact the aggrieved person.

In a recent case reference was made to a garda whose wife died in tragic circumstances and much play was made of the fact that the garda was involved in the Abbeylara case. That prompted an enormous storm of controversy and a considerable number of people said they would not buy the Sunday Independent subsequently. There was a commercial angle to this case. A week later the editor put an apology on the frontpage of that newspaper. I am not sure how appropriate that was. I cannot speculate on the motives of those concerned as to whether they were genuine; they may well have had as much to do with circulation figures as anything else. If a person was grieving and had his or her grief exacerbated by an unpleasant article, it is unlikely that pain would be salved by the matter being carried on the frontpage of the newspaper the next week again, even with an apology, because it would rub salt into the wound caused by the original offence — at least that is what I would feel if I was the person involved.

I recognise it is a difficult situation for an editor but there should be the possibility of some degree of contact. There was no question of damages in this case, as far as I know, because up to now we cannot be accused of libelling the dead, although I intend to table an amendment on that issue. I am keen to support the making of an apology for such an offence.

I was ambushed on "The Late Late Show" on Friday night by a little squirt who made me think of Alexander Pope's lines about Grub Street: "Yet let me flap that gilded bug ... that stinks and stings". He referred to the fact, completely out of context in my opinion, that I had taken legal advice about an article that appeared in the Evening Herald. That article stated that I was the kind of person who would buzz off to Iraq because I opposed the war and pin medals on Saddam Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, to reward them for torturing and murdering their own people. I have been to Iraq. No flights were available. We had to go through the desert and when I inquired, on getting back to Jordan, why it was necessary to travel at 120 miles an hour through the desert, which was rather uncomfortable and gave me vehicle sickness, I was told it was because they had not been able to get insurance because of the number of people who were shooting at our types of vehicles. I had a blazing row about human rights with the Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz. I did not relish the fact, therefore, that my reputation was being taken away from me by being told that I was a supporter of Saddam Hussein. I was one of the people who opposed him on human rights grounds from day one when Rumsfeld and the rest of them were colluding with him.

I sought an apology but I was met with silence. I then got my lawyers to make the initial moves towards suing. We settled before the case came to court. I got an apology and a moderate sum of money, most of which was devoured by the lawyers, but what I wanted was the apology. I was told that I had a hissy fit — that was the expression used. I wonder if the fact that I was ambushed on "The Late Late Show" prompted the Irish Mail on Sunday, which I have never infected my eyeballs by reading, to repeat a scurrilous article from its trashy sister, Ireland on Sunday, of some years ago in the past few weeks. I also had an entire column devoted to me by Fintan O'Toole, who is a fine journalist, but never in my life have I read an article by him which referred to the Seanad. I wonder, because I am a naive person, if that could all be coincidence or could it have some relation to the type of comments I was making here in the House. Is that the reason so many of my colleagues are a little wary of taking on the newspapers? I am not at all bothered about that.

That particular journalist is a stranger to the truth, to put it diplomatically, because I said on that programme that he described the Dalai Lama in a certain way. It probably will not appear in the Official Report because it is vulgar but he said the Dalai Lama was a gobshite. I did not believe that was appropriate. He made many more vulgar remarks which I will not put——