Denis O’Brien was still a dominant player in the Irish media landscape when he issued the press release that saw him spend much of the last two weeks sitting at the back of a Dublin courtroom.
On October 26th, 2016, James Morrissey, a journalist-turned-public relations consultant and long-time spokesman for O’Brien, sent the statement to various media outlets, responding to a recently published study on media ownership in Ireland.
At the time, O’Brien was the largest shareholder in Independent News & Media (INM), the publisher of the Irish Independent and the Sunday Independent, and he controlled Communicorp, the operator of various radio stations throughout the State.
O’Brien’s significant stake in the Irish media landscape was the subject of criticism in the study, which had been commissioned by then-Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan.
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The report concluded by noting “grave concerns” arising from the high concentration of media ownership in Ireland, “in particular regarding the position of INM and Mr Denis O’Brien”.
The report also highlighted what it described as O’Brien’s “sustained and regular threats of legal action” against outlets and journalists reporting on his business activities.
O’Brien responded sharply to the criticism in his statement, and inferred that the study was an example of Sinn Féin pushing a political agenda: “An ‘independent study’ commissioned by a leading member of Sinn Féin? Hardly.”
It was a sentence in the third-to-last paragraph of the statement, however, that saw two co-authors of the report level a claim of defamation against O’Brien and Morrissey.
On Friday, a High Court jury found that words contained in the statement, “Sinn Féin/IRA certainly got the report they paid for”, defamed two Belfast-based solicitors, Darragh Mackin and Gavin Booth.
The solicitors had argued – and the jury ultimately agreed – that those words meant they acted for an unlawful organisation, the IRA.
He played the man, not the ball, and the consequences of that were grave.
— Darragh Mackin on O’Brien’s statement.
O’Brien and Morrissey had denied the material defamed the solicitors. It was their case that the words meant the report was not fair or balanced, and served to further Sinn Féin’s political agenda.
O’Brien has long since dispensed with his interests in the Irish media landscape: he sold his INM shares in 2019 to Belgian conglomerate Mediahuis, and in 2021, German firm Bauer Media Group bought out Communicorp.
But the lengthy statement – and the defamation suit that arose from it – led the jury of nine men and three women to consider evidence against a backdrop of the largely-forgotten political debate that swirled around his once significant shareholding in the industry.
Booth was a paralegal at the Belfast firm KRW Law when Lynn Boylan initially got in touch about working on a report on the concentration of media ownership in Ireland.
The report was to be paid for by Sinn Féin’s European Parliament grouping, GUE/NGL. Booth said he was delighted with the proposition – he was starting to attract work for his firm, developing his own career in law.
Media ownership in Ireland was a cross-party issue at the time, Booth told the jury.
As work progressed, Booth’s colleague at KRW, Mackin, got involved. Two London-based barristers, Caoilfhionn Gallagher and Jonathan Price, were also drafted in to work on the report.
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Mackin told the jury he was aware of debate surrounding the potential introduction of legislation aimed at curbing media ownership in Ireland at the time they were commissioned to carry out the report. The defence asserted that Sinn Féin was agitating for such legislation to apply retroactively to O’Brien’s media assets.
In early October 2016, the media ownership report was launched in Leipzig, Germany, and then some weeks later at the Cliff Townhouse, on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin.
Mackin said the report was generally well received. Booth spoke of the report being a proud moment for him – it was in the papers, he had been photographed at the launch.
Morrissey had a different view of the report. Morrissey, who worked as a reporter and editor before moving into public relations, labelled it “hopelessly biased” and “clearly targeted” at Mr O’Brien and INM.
Morrissey made various complaints. O’Brien was mentioned in the report 44 times, but RTÉ only six, he told the jury. It ignored the prominence of British news media in Ireland. Roy Greenslade, a British journalist and self-professed IRA supporter, was a significant contributor to the report, and was later sent an advance copy of the report, he said.
In Morrissey’s view, the report arose from a “very, very fractious history” between INM and “the republican movement” – or “Sinn Féin, IRA”.
For many decades, Morrissey said, editors at the Sunday Independent – the group’s flagship title – took a “trenchant stand” against violence on the island of Ireland, with the paper regularly condemning “republican activities”.
O’Brien had been “caught in the crossfire” of this fractious history, Morrissey said.
Prior to the report, Lynn Boylan had made a complaint to the Press Council about INM, Morrissey pointed out. Boylan had “stoked up” the co-authors to publish the report, he claimed.
Mackin and Booth voiced specific concerns about the impact of the statement in context of their careers working with people impacted by the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Booth appeared emotional in the witness box when he spoke of the “disgusting” statement, and specifically, the complained-of sentence.
He said that he’d never been in trouble – at the time, he’d made it to his late 20s without getting so much as a speeding ticket, he said – but suddenly he was being labelled as an IRA sympathiser.
Mackin and Booth voiced specific concerns about the impact of the statement in context of their careers working with people impacted by the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
They said that they had worked for people across the community in the North – including ex-paramilitaries and those bereaved by the conflict – but worried that being accused of aligning with the IRA could adversely impact those client relationships – or worse, put them in danger.
“He played the man, not the ball, and the consequences of that were grave,” Mackin said of O’Brien’s statement.
According to Morrissey, O’Brien’s statement aimed to rebut the “imbalance” and “falsifications” in the “stitch-up” report. He said he stood over “every word” of the statement.
He strongly denied the statement was an attempt to discredit the report and its authors at a time when O’Brien was seeking to add Celtic Media Group – the publisher of several local newspapers – to his stable of media assets.
It was put to Morrisey that if he hadn’t included “IRA” in the complained-of sentence, the proceedings could have been avoided.
In the “murky world of the past”, Morrissey replied, Sinn Féin and the IRA “were one and the same”.
In the end, neither Boylan nor O’Brien were called to the witness box – a fact jumped on by the defence and the plaintiffs’ respectively.
O’Brien instead watched on from the back of Court 25, at times seeming agitated.
Sitting in a bench beyond him, survivors of the Stardust tragedy – including well-known campaigner Antoinette Keegan – attended in support of the plaintiffs. Mackin last year represented bereaved families at an inquest into the 48 deaths at the nightclub in Artane, Dublin in 1984.
The jury was ultimately tasked with answering one key question to determine the case – what did the words complained of mean?
Other defences fell away during the course of the trial.
The defence had asserted Mackin and Booth falsely claimed authorship of the report, and weren’t identified by O’Brien’s statement, but this argument was eventually dropped.
In the absence of sufficient evidence, Mr Justice Tony O’Connor did not allow defences of qualified privilege and fair and reasonable publication on a matter of public interest to go to the jury.
After two hours and 20 minutes of deliberation, the jury decided that Mackin and O’Brien had been seriously defamed by the statement.
O’Brien and Morrissey showed little reaction as the verdict was announced. They left prompty when the judge vacated the bench.
They must now pay the solicitors a total of €823,500 in damages, plus their legal costs.
