Supreme Court begins hearing 'Irish Times' appeal

The right to protect journalistic sources requires the most compelling issues of public interest to be overridden, lawyers for The Irish Timeshave told the Supreme Court.

A five-judge Supreme Court is hearing the appeal by Irish Timeseditor Geraldine Kennedy and public affairs correspondent Colm Keena against a High Court order requiring them to answer questions from the Mahon tribunal.

The tribunal wants to ask questions relating to the source of an article about financial payments to former taoiseach Bertie Ahern when he was minister for finance in 1993.

A stay on the High Court order permitting the questioning remains in place pending the outcome of the appeal.

Donal O'Donnell SC for The Irish Timestold the court today that the story newspaper published in 2006 about financial payments to Mr Ahern was at the heart of public discourse, and protected by articles in the Constitution and the European of Convention of Human rights.

Mr O’Donnell said the article could not be said to be trivial or meretricious.

He said the High Court’s view that the newspaper’s journalists were not at risk of identifying sources at the tribunal was profoundly misplaced. He said the tribunal was very “diligent and careful” in playing a “parlour game” by attempting to identify the source of the article and if the wrong answer was given, people could go “directly to jail”.

Just because people who were questioned did not know a source, it did not follow that the information that they gave might not assist in the identification of that source, Mr O’Donnell said.

While there was still a balance to be achieved between the protection of sources and the public interest, it was only in the most exceptional of cases that the right to protect sources could be ignored.

This was a story which had dominated public discourse after its publication in September 2006 right through the general election campaign of the following year, he said.

At the time the information came into the possession of The Irish Times, Editor Geraldine Kennedy said it was by no means apparent it would have otherwise emerged into the public domain.

In October 2007, the High Court made an order requiring the journalists to answer questions from the tribunal about the source of the article, written by Mr Keena and published in The Irish Timeson September 21st, 2006.

The tribunal claimed the article was based on a confidential letter sent by it during its private investigative stage to businessman David McKenna. In its judgment, the High Court ruled the Irish Timesprivilege against disclosure of sources in the case was "overwhelmingly outweighed" by the "pressing social need" to preserve public confidence in the tribunal.

The case continues.