Liability for cost of injunction application against Gemma O’Doherty to be decided later

Liability for the costs of a successful application by Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital and its director of nursing for injunctions requiring Gemma O’Doherty to remove certain internet videos posted by her will depend on the outcome of the full action, a High Court judge has decided.

Mr Justice Senan Allen last July granted injunctions requiring Ms O’Doherty to remove, pending the full hearing of defamation proceedings against her, the videos. He also granted orders restraining her publishing any defamatory statements about the plaintiffs pending the full trial. He granted the injunctions, under the Defamation Act 2009, pending the full hearing.

In the videos, Ms O’Doherty claimed, inter alia, hospital staff are being “forced” to take “experimental Covid-19 injections” which, she alleged, have killed thousands of people.

She also described the hospital as “a death camp,” and alleged it employed “psychopaths and had committed crimes against humanity”.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Allen found, on the evidence before him, that the videos were defamatory, Ms O’Doherty had no reasonable defence and granted injunctions requiring her to take them down.

‘Devoid of substance’

What Ms O’Doherty had said in her reporting about the hospital and its director of nursing, Marie Murray, was “devoid of substance” and there was no prospect of her ever standing it up, he said.

With the right of free speech “comes the responsibility not to wantonly or recklessly impugn the good name of others,” he added.

The judge had expressed a provisional view that costs of the injunction application would be costs in the cause, meaning they would be dependent on the outcome of the full case, but he adjourned his final decision on costs of the injunction application to allow the sides to make submissions.

The plaintiffs supported his proposed order while Ms O’Doherty, representing herself, filed a costs submission the thrust of which, the judge said, was that no order for costs be made at this stage.

Complaints

She made various complaints about the injunction hearing, at which she had represented herself, describing it as unfair, argued the publication of the videos was a matter of “acute public interest”, the substance of the case remains undecided and there should be no costs order at this stage.

In a ruling on Tuesday, the judge said Ms O’Doherty seemed to misunderstand the nature of the interlocutory application but he was reasonably confident her arguments amounted to not arguing against the costs order he proposed, that costs of the injunction application would be costs in the cause. That provisional costs order recognised the substance of the action remained undecided, he said.