Section 12(2) of the proposed section provides that, "A statement concerning a body corporate that is made on or after ... the coming into operation of section 6 of the Defamation (Amendment) Act 2025 is not defamatory unless its publication has caused, or is likely to cause, serious harm to the reputation of the body corporate." In other words, a test is being laid down for companies that it has to be serious harm. There has to be serious defamation for a company.
In this amendment we are saying it has to be a serious defamation. I will be glad to hear from the Minister why it is considered the case that a company can only sue for what is called a serious defamation but a private citizen can sue for something which would not amount to a serious defamation.
Key terms by TF-IDF across 6,080 words from 8 speakers. The summary quotes the highest-scoring sentences verbatim — nothing is paraphrased.
Tellers: Tá, Senators Michael McDowell and Sharon Keogan; Níl, Senators Garret Ahearn and Paul Daly.
Party shown is the one each member held on 2025-10-09, 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.