Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2025-11-12
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Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

I move amendment No. 10:
In page 12, between lines 7 and 8, to insert the following:
“ ‘live broadcast’ includes a broadcast where a short time delay between the utterance of any spoken matter and its broadcast is created for editorial purposes or control;”.
One of the things that occurred to me about the Minister's amendment, which I support in principle but which needs to be debated, is that the concept of a live broadcast is that effectively as people speak in a studio or whatever or at a demonstration or wherever else what is said or seen is instantly available to the viewer or the listener. From about 20 years ago, some of the independent broadcasters have had a delayed-broadcast facility. I know that still applies because during the referendum debates, I was sometimes finished an interview with an interviewer on local radio and came into my PA's room in Leinster House and found myself still speaking on the radio. I understand that is done to give the producer of the programme the right to press a button and stop it if something terrible happens in the course of a live broadcast.
The purpose of this amendment is to include short-delay mechanisms within the protection that the Minister proposes for live broadcasts. A live broadcast does not cease to be live by virtue of there being a 30-second delay on the transmission of what appears to the listener or the viewer to be live. I was anxious for that aspect of the Minister's amendment to be clarified to make sure that nobody claims it was not live because there was an opportunity for an alert producer to press a button and that it ceases to have the protection of that whole section in its entirety. I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-11-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:18+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-12