Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024: Report and Final Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-21 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland Briefly, in reply, I have two things to say. I believe the defence of this particular provision put forward by the Minister is very weak. I will give him the following examples. It fails completely to distinguish between the personal proprietor of the restaurant Senator Mullen referred to, and the fact his family business has been incorporated as a shareholding with his wife. It fails completely and arbitrarily to deal with that situation, which I find wrong. Second, there is no explanation as to where this particular provision came from. If the newspapers and their lobbyists cooked this one up I do not see what point they were trying to make. I will give a topical example. If Elon Musk, as a follow-on from his row with Michael O’Leary - who at least pays tax in Ireland - announced that the safety standards in Ryanair were so low that you would be mad to use their flights – and said that maliciously – does Ryanair have to prove that Musk’s accusation of low safety standards is likely to cause it financial loss? How can it prove it? It is out there. We know Mr. Musk accused the man who was devising the method for saving the Thai footballers who were stuck in a cave due to a flood of being a paedophile because he had the bad taste to query whether a submarine that Musk claimed he would invent to rescue them would be effective. Where you have somebody like him making an accusation against Aer Lingus or Ryanair saying their safety standards are such that nobody in their right mind should fly with them, are they free to do that? Are they free to just fling any dirt they like or are commercial competitors who see a company growing fast in a position to fling any untruth that occurs to them into the public domain without consequence because the company to which they are referring is doing very well, thank you? Why should a small company which owns a business with two shareholders in a family be in a different position from a single self-employed person providing the same service across the road if he or she is defamed? I do not see the logic of this. I do not know who the Minister thinks he is doing a favour for by introducing this particular measure. I really cannot see why such a distinction should be made in law. If you defame a business that is owned by a company deliberately, why should that company not make you answerable and ask from where did you get that data that was published that it was three times as dangerous to fly with one airline rather than another? I do not understand it and I do not understand it in the much smaller example that Senator Mullen referred to as a restaurateur in Salthill in Galway being in a wholly different position from a competing restaurant down the road which happens to be run by a business and that a charge can be made against the individual running one company that he is serving unsafe food but not against the other because there has to be immunity from suit in the absence of actual proof of the likelihood of financial loss or the actual fact of financial loss. If you are a restaurateur and somebody says that you are serving substandard food or you are purloining the tips of your staff with complete impunity based on the proposition that the restaurant in the circumstances has not actually suffered, its reputation is nonetheless extremely compromised by giving a licence to people to say those kinds of things and, as I say, where we have identical businesses being carried on by natural persons as opposed to bodies corporate to have a different set of remedies for one rather than the other seems to me to be wholly wrong. The last point I will make is this. The Minister, on Committee Stage, revealed that the Attorney General’s office had expressed concerns about the serious harm test applying to individuals. If there is a constitutional issue there - which I think is fanciful, to be charitable to that office - there is a constitutional issue too for the two shareholders in a company who are being told that they must prove serious harm and that it must be financial in nature rather than reputational. I will not push the point 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