As he said himself, if there is no financial loss, there should not be a defamation case. What the Minister would say about that is that you cannot just sue, in the case of a body corporate which is trading for profit, unless you satisfy a court that the defamation has caused serious harm or is likely - that is subject to what I have just said - to cause a serious financial loss to the company.
The way I am doing that is by saying that companies cannot bring defamation claims unless they have suffered financial loss or as a result of the statement are likely to suffer financial loss. The last part of this section states: "court" means, in relation to a defamation action brought in the High Court, the jury, if the High Court is sitting with a jury; "defamation action" does not include an application for a declaration order.
Key terms by TF-IDF across 8,663 words from 11 speakers. The summary quotes the highest-scoring sentences verbatim — nothing is paraphrased.
Tellers: Tá, Senators Michael McDowell and Joe Conway; Níl, Senators Garret Ahearn and Paul Daly.
Party shown is the one each member held on 2025-10-15, frozen by a dated join — not their party today. The Oireachtas API publishes no date of birth and returns an empty gender field for every member in this period, so no age or gender breakdown is shown.