Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024: Report and Final Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-21 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland One of the points collateral to the point I made earlier, and I ask the Minister to bear it in mind, is that if the choirboy sues the bishop for sexual abuse, the choirboy is entitled to a jury. However, if a relative of the choirboy, or a newspaper, says the bishop sexually assaulted the choirboy, there is no jury and, effectively, the evidence in both cases would be the same. If we trust a jury to decide in the case of a sexual assault where the truth lies, I cannot see why we say, because the parties are slightly different and it is the parent of the choirboy who made the remark that the bishop assaulted his son sexually in the sacristy, or whatever it is, along the model of the Australian case, or if a newspaper says there is overwhelming evidence that the bishop assaulted the choirboy sexually, these cases should be tried in wholly different manners. I am not in favour of abolishing juries in cases of assault, trespass to the person and malicious falsehood at all. However, it is very strange that we are reforming the law to say that the same evidence is effectively to be tried, tested and adjudicated on by a jury in one case and, in another, it is to be done by a judge alone. The Minister will say that we have respect for our Judiciary. I accept that we respect members of the Judiciary and we should not attack them gratuitously. However, there are, and always have been, judges who were soft in personal injuries matters. There are, and always have been, cases, as the Minister well knows, where the amount of a personal injuries offer shoots up when a particular judge is selected to try the case. To say somehow that judges will arrive at the same view as a jury is a little bit detached from the day-to-day realities encountered, particularly by those in the courts. I say that without any rancour towards the Judiciary or any particular member of the it. Nobody who is a practitioner of law would contradict what I have just said. I will not spend any more time on this amendment. It is important that there should be capacity to determine - in the context of the exceptional nature of a case, not as a rule - that a jury would be more appropriate and preferable. The Minister cavils with the term "preferable". Maybe one party would prefer a jury, but the reason we selected the President of the High Court in our amendment was that when you are setting down a matter for trial, you would not know what judge you are going to get. It would be a random enough exercise. If, at that stage, you have to ask the president's permission to put a case before a jury due to its exceptional nature, the identity of the parties or the nature of the issues involved, you do not know which judge of the High Court is going appear some time later when the notice of trial of the case is put into effect and the trial happens. You do not know whether you are selecting judge A or judge B when you go to the President and ask for a jury trial. It is not as if it is forum shopping in order to avoid particular judges. The purpose of it is to allow for exceptional cases. In my experience, the public accepts jury verdicts unquestioningly. If a jury says that it thinks witness A was untruthful or whatever, that is it. Twelve people, nine out of those 12 or whatever came to that conclusion. The acceptance of jury verdicts in such cases is extremely high. There may have been instances where people thought that juries in defamation cases got the fundamental facts wrong, but I have never seen that. If that process is adjudicated on by a judge, the unhappy media will immediately say "This is the third time that that judge has flung out a case against this particular newspaper or that particular broadcaster." They will personalise it. There will be profiles of the judge published by dissatisfied litigants. That is the point I am making. It was in order to avoid what the proponents of the abolition of juries spent most of their time arguing, which was that the quantification of damages was erratic and unpredictable, that subsection (4) was inserted to leave it to a judge to determine damages, aggravated damages and exemplary damages in accordance with the finding of the jury. I will not put it any further than that. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-01-21/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-21