MacGill Summer SchoolMedia coverage of litigation and court decisions was sharply criticised by Mr Justice Hardiman at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, yesterday .
The Supreme Court judge claimed that it was "often uninformative or confusing", adding that while one could generally glean the result of a case from a media report, there was rarely a sense of the process which led to the result.
"Indeed, even this is often distorted as the media report focuses on some incidental but picaresque detail, or on the need for a sensational headline."
Mr Justice Hardiman referred to the coverage of a Supreme Court decision favourable to a defendant in a drunken driving case. "The case manifestly turned on its own facts - it was not a test case - and the judgments said so in unmistakable terms.
"The defendant's solicitor, interviewed on the radio, also said so in unmistakable terms, and did his best to explain the narrow factual matrix of the case.
"This was brushed aside by the interviewer who asked him how many drunken driving cases were pending in the country as a whole, and went on to state without qualification that all these cases might now fail.
"It was now, of course, perfectly clear that neither the interviewer, his producer or any of his researchers had read the short and perfectly comprehensible judgments in the case."
A few days ago, he added, a newspaper report had focused on the important question of the mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for possession of drugs above a certain value.
"The actual court reporting was fine, but in an adjacent piece of comment and explanation, it was said quite simply that the mandatory sentence provision was largely ignored by judges. This is simply false.
"The statute itself provides for the circumstances in which the court is not obliged to impose the minimum sentence, and the Court of Criminal Appeal has given several judgments, binding on sentencing courts, in explanation of the statutory provision. None of this was properly discussed."
Mr Justice Hardiman said this phenomenon was particularly depressing, precisely because it coincided with a time of enormous improvement in the coverage of other important areas of life. "In law, there seems to be a rigid demarcation between those who report developments and those who, occasionally only, comment upon them.
"Law in Ireland very badly needs to find its William Reville or its Des Cahill, informed enthusiasts who can comment regularly, comprehensibly and consistently, with expert knowledge."
Yesterday's programme at the summer school also included debates on the media and politics, the value for money in the public services and Senator David Norris's James Joyce Show.
Three journalists, Mark Hennessy, political correspondent of The Irish Times, the RTÉ journalist and author of The Naked Politician, Katie Hannon, and the Evening Herald editor, Gerard O'Regan, were the media speakers.
The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Mr John Perry TD, said the misuse and outright squandering of taxpayers' money was what upset most people about politics and politicians.