Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Rónán Mullen (IND), National University of Ireland

If I may contribute on this point, I understand that many of the claims made for this legislation were that it was addressing strategic lawsuits against public participation. I suppose there is an underlying desire to prevent the ability of companies to take defamation actions to impinge excessively on people's freedom to communicate ideas. However, is serious financial loss the only serious harm one can do to a body corporate that trades for profit?
If I was a restaurant owner in Salthill and somebody in a local newspaper or wherever said something malicious and false about the restaurant, it might or might not cause me what is called serious financial loss, depending on how well set up I am as a business. It could hurt the reputation of the business around town. It might not cause serious financial loss but it would be deeply unfair and wrong that a person or entity could just go around speaking untruths of a kind, perhaps about the company's financial management practices, industrial relations attitude or the treatment of its staff and so on. It may be a relatively small company that is successful enough to withstand the financial consequences of malicious and adverse false comment, but there would still be damage. There would be damage to the company's identity, its sense of itself, its reputation around town and so on.
Can the Minister conceive of circumstances like that, where it might not be serious financial loss but it is wrong? What protection should there be against people who maliciously make false statements about, for example, a small business in the situation I have described?

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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