Although the Supreme Court has stated the media are "the eyes and ears" of the public in the courts, the entitlement to report court cases is restricted in several and sometimes arbitrary ways.
There is a blanket ban on reporting family law cases, apart from judgments. In cases of rape and sexual assault, there is statutory provision to prevent the reporting of material which might disclose the identity of the victim. The media are also restricted in reporting proceedings involving minors or the Criminal Assets Bureau, and are not even permitted to sit in on some of those cases.
In other cases, judges have, for various reasons, ordered or recommended that the identities of persons not be disclosed. The media's role in reporting the courts was considerably clarified in a Supreme Court decision of April 1998 upholding a challenge by The Irish Times and other media organisations to a Circuit Court judge's ban on contemporaneous reporting of a major drugs trial in Cork.
The Supreme Court said the constitutional requirement that justice should be administered in public, set out in Article 34.1, should be adhered to save in exceptional circumstances.
It also found a ban on contemporaneous reporting should be issued only where there was a real risk of prejudicing the accused's right to a fair trial.
That Supreme Court decision was relied on yesterday by Mr Eoin McCullough SC, for The Irish Times and other media organisations, when challenging Judge O'Connor's initial order prohibiting any reporting of the case before him.
Mr McCullough's argument rested on two central points - a judge could not interfere with the reporting of a case unless publication was prohibited by law or interfered with the right to a fair trial. Neither circumstance applied in this case.
The judge stressed his primary concern was to preserve the anonymity of the victim. He said he had discretion to control proceedings and also had to have regard to how the media reported matters, especially sexual assault cases which received extensive publicity. If he was told a man was going to get serious publicity, that was a punishment in itself and sentence might be influenced by the fact an accused would be exposed in the media to his detriment.
After considering the submissions, he agreed to vary his order.