Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-21
============================================================

Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

The amendment seeks to give the High Court an identical jurisdiction to the Circuit Court in respect of identification orders. It may well be that the Circuit Court is cheaper. I sometimes wonder about that. It certainly is a lot more inconvenient in certain circumstances.
The other point is that the Circuit Court is a court of local and limited jurisdiction. So is it where the defendant resides or where the defamation took place? Is that to determine which circuit is to exercise the jurisdiction?

---

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