Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024: From the Seanad
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-11
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Jim O'Callaghan (FF), Dublin Bay South

It is not the most significant change that I am going to be introducing as a Minister, to be frank with the Deputy. When we look at it, it is removing juries from the High Court in defamation actions. There is no right. I was listening to Deputy Boyd Barrett, who very carefully used his language. I was waiting for him to say it is a right, and in fairness, he did not - he said it is a principle. It is not a right to have a jury in a civil action. It is a principle that had developed but which has gradually been removed on the grounds of efficiency. There is a basis upon which the Government wants to remove juries from defamation actions. There is an understandable basis as to why that is happening.
What it will mean in practice is that people will have a greater awareness as to the likely award in a defamation action. If somebody defames Deputy Kelly, Deputy Boyd Barrett or Deputy Ward, and it is a bad defamation, and they go to a lawyer and ask what a court will award them, it is very difficult to advise them what will be awarded if they go before a High Court jury. It depends on what a jury will assess as being the appropriate value. I know that in the Higgins case, the Supreme Court set out what the values should be but from a jury's perspective, it is very hard to advise someone as to the potential liability. If somebody is being sued, it is hard to assess or tell them the potential pitfalls of the case.
There are now to be judge-only determinations. I am aware there are negative consequences to that. There will be positive consequences but, of course, there will be negative consequences as well. However, if there is judge-made law in respect of this area, we will see greater consistency and a greater ability to determine what is the likelihood of an award.
It is the case, by the way, that in the Circuit Court people can get damages of up to €65,000 or €75,000 in a defamation case. A lot of people go for defamation cases in the Circuit Court, mainly because it is more predictable. There is uncertainty if someone goes before a jury of 12 because they do not really know what the outcome is going to be. A point that has been made is that there is certainly a very strong authority to a jury award, and they are very hard to overturn. What we are going to find now is that there will be a lot of recorded and reserved judgments in defamation actions. If we look through the law reports at present, we will not find High Court decisions on defamation actions in general. They are all, like criminal cases, determinations by a jury, so we just see the award of the jury report in a newspaper. Sometimes, we will see an assessment of a defamation case if it goes to appeal.
From now on, however, we will see a body of law being developed, and written judgments by judges setting out why the plaintiff was entitled to €100,000, or whatever the sum is, for being defamed. It will develop a body of law which, in itself, I would have thought is a positive development, as opposed to the unpredictability.
To come back to the Deputy’s point, the reason I have changed my mind-----

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-11