THE behaviour of some sections of the media in the trial of Eamonn Lillis for the manslaughter of his wife Celine Cawley was an intrusion into privacy. The spectacle of photographers being up ladders on trees in Mr Lillis’s back garden in Howth and following his under-age daughter in their last days before he went to jail is unacceptable.
There are serious issues arising from the trial for the media and the administration of justice.
The Constitution tells us that justice must be administered in public, except in a few “special and limited” cases. This necessity has two sides to it. It sanctions prurience and lurid curiosity. It facilitates the unappealing human instinct to wallow in the sins and miseries of others. But it also underpins democracy and human rights. Trust in the system of justice is crucial to society. Openness, in turn, is essential to that trust. The framers of the Constitution knew very well that the alternative to public courts is the star chamber.
These two sides of open court proceedings – the feeding of base curiosity and the protection of human rights – are so intertwined as to be inseparable. Inquisitiveness is the price we pay for transparency, but it is a price worth paying. Any attempt to block the former will inevitably end up undermining the latter. As the Constitution wisely implies, the rule must be that the court process is open and the exceptions must be rare and compelling. It follows therefore that media access to that process should be taken for granted unless there are very good reasons to restrict it. Journalists can sit in court to report proceedings and custom and practice dictates that photographs can be taken of most witnesses.
This is why the decision of the Garda Síochána to shield a witness in the trial of Eamonn Lillis, Jean Treacy, from public view is such a worrying development. For reasons that have not yet been explained, Ms Treacy was taken through an underground entrance to the new criminal courts building, ensuring that she could not be filmed or photographed. On her exit from the court, gardaí allegedly set up a road block to prevent photographers from following her.
It is easy to understand why Ms Treacy would not want to be photographed and hard to sympathise with the tabloid press. Neither of these emotions, however, should obscure the nature of what happened: gardaí took an arbitrary decision to restrict the public nature of the administration of justice.
No one argues that the media’s right to photograph those engaged in a trial is absolute. It has long been accepted that children and those involved in family law cases should retain their privacy.
There are circumstances in which the anonymity of a witness must be protected. But there are no grounds for saying that some witnesses against whom no threats have been made should be shielded from the media while others should not.
The whole point of a legal system is that it should operate according to clear, objective, impersonal and open rules. By taking it on themselves to restrict the public nature of the justice system in such an incoherent and apparently whimsical way, the Garda are in danger of damaging the very system they are pledged to protect. The Garda Commissioner needs to explain this particular event. What criteria are to apply and to whom?