Journalism and the law conference: The Government's Privacy Bill should be a cause of alarm for media professionals and throughout Irish society as a whole, a conference in Dublin on Journalism and the Law was told at the weekend.
Solicitor and media law specialist Andrea Martin told the conference, organised by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), that she was not against the protection of privacy rights but regarded the current Bill as "premature" and "poorly-drafted".
When she first read the Privacy Bill she could not believe it was as bad as it looked: "My initial alarm was justified and, I would suggest, should cause alarm throughout the profession and, indeed, throughout society, which benefits from having a free and vigorous press at work."
Ms Martin continued that Minister for Justice Michael McDowell "seems to have gone through a rather appalling road to Damascus" in his attitude to privacy legislation. Addressing Seanad Éireann in February, 2005, he had declared himself unconvinced of the need for privacy legislation and indicated a preference for "an organic case-by-case build up of jurisprudence".
She claimed it was "no secret" that this legislation on privacy was the "political price" the Minister believed he had to pay for getting the parallel Defamation Bill through the legislature. "If that is the case, then the price is too high," the speaker said.
Cabinet members seeking to pass the Privacy Bill into law were "shooting themselves in the foot". The way of addressing privacy issues in the print media was through "a vigorous, lively, engaged, conscientious Press Council", said Ms Martin, who lectures in media law at NUI Galway and NUI Maynooth.
The editors of two national daily newspapers, Geraldine Kennedy of The Irish Times and Gerard O'Regan of the Irish Independent, also took part in the conference and spoke out strongly against the proposed privacy legislation.
Ms Kennedy said she was in a "unique position" in that she had taken an action for privacy so that the State could not engage in unlawful telephone tapping: "So let there be no doubt about where I stand on the right to privacy myself."
However, the current proposed legislation marked "a defining moment" in Irish journalism. "The drop in standards in journalism has galvanised many Ministers in this Government into the position that there will be no change in the libel laws without the passage of privacy legislation." There seemed to be "a similar view" on the part of the alternative coalition.
"If the Privacy Bill 2006 is enacted, good journalism, investigative journalism, stories pursued in the greater public interest, will come to an end. None of us can be complacent about this development. We are the eyes and ears of the public in Irish society."
The target of this "iniquitous" legislation would not only be the tabloid newspapers with their "often-invasive" celebrity stories. "The Privacy Bill will change fundamentally the practice of newsgathering and investigative journalism in newspapers and the broadcasting media in ways that its authors could not possibly have imagined," she said.
Whereas the law of defamation punished a newspaper after publication, the new privacy law would be used in advance. "My great fear of the Privacy Bill is that it will prevent good journalism and make it impossible for any serious matter of public interest to be investigated properly, never mind being brought to publication," Ms Kennedy said.
Mr O'Regan said journalism was a "trial-and-error" process of trying to find out what you didn't know and what other people usually didn't want you to know. "So trying to legislate for that, as is suggested in the Privacy Bill, is absolutely ridiculous, illogical and nonsensical."
In the past, Mr McDowell had opposed privacy legislation, "yet he goes along and because of collective cabinet thuggery coming from, allegedly, the Fianna Fáil side, he says, 'Well, on second thoughts, let's do the privacy thing'."
Acknowledging that standards of taste in the print and broadcast media generally had fallen, Mr O'Regan said: "I think the politicians are using this to try and nobble the press and that's very clearly what's at stake in this particular debate."
RTÉ's editor of current affairs, David Nally, said: "When we point out the shortcomings or the dangers of the proposed Act, it's important not to sound like we don't accept that there is any need for the public to have a protection or a remedy from the possibility of media intrusion into their private lives."
However, he said there were "several aspects of the Bill which would give me concern and which I think we need reassurance on".
He continued: "The Bill seems to allow any chancer to put a bona fide journalist who isn't doing anything wrong on the back foot from the start."
He added: "I would have thought that before the journalist is deemed to have committed a violation, which they now must defend, that there should be an onus on the plaintiff to show that an actual invasion of privacy has happened."
On the proposed Press Council, NUJ Irish secretary Séamus Dooley said that, in order to be genuinely independent, such a body "must include representatives of civic society and must operate and be funded in a manner that instils confidence in the public."
He added: "I wouldn't trust and I wouldn't expect the public to trust a Press Council appointed by government, neither would I trust a Press Council funded and controlled and constituted exclusively of friends of newspaper owners.
The public must be granted some level of intelligence, they must be given the opportunity to realise that the only real guarantee of an independent Press Council is an independent chair and outside civic involvement."