Journalist tells court behaviour of man in delivery room was ‘appalling’

Journalist Brenda Power has told a High Court jury she stands by a newspaper column in which she criticised what she insists was the "appalling" behaviour of a man in suing a midwife over the interruption of his filming at the birth of his first baby.

Ms Power said when midwife Iris Halbach asked John McCauley to put down his camera and stop filming after his daughter Simone was born by C-section in Mount Carmel Hospital, Dublin, in September 2006, that should have been the end of the matter.

The midwife had asked him to do so because she had only minutes to carry out a procedure whereby she had to clear baby’s lungs of mucus and get her breathing, Ms Power said.

“Most people would have done what they were asked,” she said. “Had she [midwife] not done so, he might have had real reason to sue the hospital.”

Ms Power was being cross-examined on the third day of Mr McCauley's action alleging defamation against her and the Sunday Times over the column published in March 2009. The claims are denied.

The column followed publicity about the dismissal of a Circuit Court action in 2009 brought by Mr McCauley against Ms Halbach and the hospital over what he alleged was the midwife’s unreasonable behaviour in insisting he stop filming just after the birth of his first child to his partner, Lithuanian teacher Jurgita Jachimaviciute.

The case resumes on Tuesday when the jury is expected to consider its verdict.

Ms Power told Colm Smyth SC, for Mr McCauley, that Mr McCauley should have listened to what the midwife said “and gone home and written her a letter of apology, not a solicitor’s letter. He sued her for having the cheek to tell him to stop.”

Ms Power did not speak to the midwife before she wrote the article but said she and Ms Halbach exchanged emails afterwards in which Ms Halbach “agreed with everything I had said”.

Ms Power, a qualified barrister, said she did not defame Mr McCauley and he had damaged himself most by bringing the action (against the midwife).

She considered Mr McCauley’s behaviour during a situation where the baby’s lungs had to be cleared to be irresponsible. Everyone would have to make comparisons with the Savita Halappanavar case where the husband did not sue the midwife and “left the theatre without his wife and baby”.

Asked whether she was referring to Mr McCauley when she referred in her article to a “a small number of men” who “clearly can’t accept the lowliness of their role” in the delivery room during the birth of a baby and who “do their damndest to project themselves centre stage”, she replied: “I think men in the delivery room have one function and that is to stay out of the way, be a comfort to their partners.”

Anyone who had to be asked to put away a camera “kind of missed the purpose of why he is there in the first place”.

Ms Power believed Mr McCauley, in bringing the case against the midwife, had wasted court time and put the midwife through the trauma of an action where she was being sued for up to €38,000 and where she might have lost her job. Most right-thinking people would not have said to him, “you sued the midwife who saved your baby, fair play to you”.

She had based her article on the facts of the court case against the midwife, which he lost and did not appeal, she added.

She told her counsel, Mark Harty SC, that she had strong feelings about the work midwives did and to think someone could be hauled before the courts for just doing their job made her very upset.