A Sunday Independent journalist told the High Court yesterday he was confident he did not get anything wrong in an article which referred to a District Court judge who is suing the newspaper for libel. Mr Gene Kerrigan said he was commenting on a genuine debate on the facts as he knew them.
Mr Kerrigan (52) was giving evidence on the third day of the hearing before Miss Justice Carroll of an action by District Court Judge Joseph Mangan against Independent Newspapers, in which he alleges he was libelled in a front-page article of March 22nd, 1998.
Evidence in the case concluded yesterday. Lawyers and the judge will address the jury today.
The article was published just days after Judge Mangan's mobile phone rang while he was sitting at Tallow Court, Co Waterford, and he left the bench with the court clerk for a short time. Judge Mangan has told the court he had left the phone on because he was expecting a call about an urgent health board application.
Judge Mangan claims the words in Mr Kerrigan's article meant he was not a fit person to hold judicial office. The defence denies the words bore the meanings claimed and pleads that they were fair comment on a matter of public interest.
Yesterday Mr Kerrigan said he had not been at any of three courts referred to in the article, but there had been newspaper reports about them. The judiciary had "moved on" with everybody else, there was a loosening up in the courts, and a lot of the pompousness and self-importance was not there.
At the time he wrote the article, two people had been locked up for several hours by two judges, one of them in relation to a person's phone going off accidentally in court. This contrasted with Judge Mangan's court, where the action had been more deliberate. He felt that if the persons who made the rules were not themselves subject to the rules, then those rules could not have a very high credibility.
The article was intended to be a semi-mocking, light-hearted piece written in a patronising tone on what he saw as a throwback to an era of pompousness and self-importance, aspects of the courts system which, he accepted, had diminished over the years.
Seventeen months after the article appeared, he got a phone call saying he was being sued. The letter was sent by solicitors for Judge Mangan in August 1999.
Cross-examined by Mr Garrett Cooney SC, for Judge Mangan, Mr Kerrigan said the article was approaching a serious subject in a light-hearted manner.
Mr Cooney asked why Mr Kerrigan had not stated that Judge Mangan's mobile phone call concerned court business. Mr Kerrigan said he did not think it was relevant. The motivation behind the call was not an issue.
Mr Cooney suggested that Mr Kerrigan had deliberately suppressed that information to make a case against Judge Mangan similar to the one he made against two other judges.
Mr Kerrigan said that was not true. Judge Mangan was suing him for not explaining what he had done in court while the judge himself had not explained in court why he did it. By not explaining what Judge Mangan had done, Mr Kerrigan said he was no more suppressing information than the judge was when he did not explain what he had done.
Mr Kerrigan said he disagreed with Mr Cooney's contention that what he wrote was a dreadful and personal attack on Judge Mangan.