Alex White (Labour)

I also welcome the amendment brought forward by the Government side. It meets a considerable amount of the debate we had on Committee Stage. I strongly support the general direction of this Bill, as I indicated before. I also support section 22 and what it seeks to achieve, in particular the change in our law such that the carrying of an apology will not be relevant to the determination of liability in a defamation action. The change proposed in this legislation is correct in this regard. I also agree with the Minister when he says that part of the intention is to make it easier for media defendants, about whom we are talking essentially, to give apologies by which he means that the Bill should incentivise media defendants to give apologies.

I ask the Minister to address a point I made on Committee Stage about the importance of timely apologies. From my experience in the media in the dark and distant past and from what one observes, the dynamic of a situation where an alleged defamation is carried in a newspaper or, perhaps even more so, on radio and television, changes very quickly. If a person believes he or she has been defamed and wishes to take action in respect of it, we all know that battle lines are quickly drawn in terms of litigation if some satisfaction is not given to that person quickly. If he or she is intelligent about it, he or she will look for a quick apology because the sting of the damage to his or her reputation, as he or she sees it, in the public domain can be most easily or satisfactorily corrected if it is done quickly. For something to take weeks, months or in some cases, as we know with litigation, years to be resolved will change the entire dynamic. The battle lines will have been drawn and, very often, it becomes concerned with something quite different from what it was about in the first place.

Why can the Minister not see the sense in encouraging not just apologies but timely apologies? The amendment proposed by us does not, as was suggested by the Minister, impose a mandatory requirement for a timely apology. It simply says that the court "may regard an apology as effecting a substantial mitigation of damage if, but only if, it is made within 14 days of complaint". It does not exclude apologies not made within that period. It simply says that an apology made in a timely and expeditious way to deal with a problem can be taken into account by the court. It is not a proposal for a mandatory requirement or anything like it. In the context of the Minister's argument about making it easier for media defendants to give apologies, can he not see the sense in at least encouraging timely apologies in the circumstances?