Journalist Kitty Holland has won her defamation action against journalist and anti-abortion activist John Waters and has been awarded damages of €35,000.
Holland, the Social Affairs Correspondent with The Irish Times, was a “much respected and ethical journalist” and for a fellow respected and well-known writer and commentator to suggest she was deceitful with a story was “consequential”, Judge John O’Connor of the Circuit Court said in a judgment delivered after a five-day hearing earlier this year.
The defamation by Waters was “a serious attack on [Holland’s] professional integrity as a journalist and caused her considerable hurt”, he said.
Waters had told the court he was expressing an opinion on a matter of public importance but had failed to show that what he had said was true, the judge said. Opinion needed to be based on fact.
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The defamation case concerned Waters’ comments in the run-up to the 2018 abortion referendum about a report written by Holland in The Irish Times in 2012 about the death in hospital of Savita Halappanavar, who was miscarrying her child when brought to the hospital.
In a speech to Renua party conference in 2017, Waters said there was not a single history any doctor could produce of a mother dying because of an inability to provide her with good treatment that was related to abortion in any way.
“Savita Halapanavar is the closest they’ve come, and we know that that’s a lie,” he said. “We know it’s a lie that resulted in the journalist who started the lie getting multiple awards from her colleagues.”
In the trial Waters said the reference to Holland was intended as an attack on the report in The Irish Times rather than on Holland, whom he had known since she was a child and against whom he had no ill-will.
However, Judge O’Connor said the comments read as if Holland “started a lie on one of the most important news stories in the last decade in Ireland and that she got awards for propagating that lie”.
He had seen no evidence that would justify an accusation of bias against Holland in her reporting. The news report published by The Irish Times was not “vitiated” by significant errors and omissions that would constitute a lie, he said. The standard of journalistic checking and verification in the story was “thorough”, he said.
Judge O’Connor awarded general damages of €35,000, saying Holland was “held in very high esteem as a journalist by her peers and this is confirmed today by this court”.
Holland was represented by Andrew Walker SC and Shane English BL, instructed by Lavelle solicitors. Waters, who was not in court, was represented by Fergal Kavanagh SC, Conor Rubalcava BL and Greg Murphy BL, instructed by Brendan Maloney solicitors.
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