Role of the media: An RTÉ broadcast which named John Carthy and gave personal details about his broken relationship with a young woman "was irresponsible and should not have happened", Mr Justice Barr found.
He said that broadcasting information on RTÉ Radio's Five Seven Live was likely to have caused Mr Carthy "substantial distress" and was also likely to have distressed his family, who had asked that it not be raised in Garda negotiations.
Five Seven Live was the first programme to broadcast Mr Carthy's name, on the second day of the siege. It also broadcast an interview with Mr Carthy's acquaintance, Mary McDowell, who gave personal details of the broken relationship and the alleged reasons for the break-up.
The package was prepared by Niall O'Flynn, programme editor and series producer. He was driving near Granard when he heard about the siege on the radio.
He got permission from his superior to go to the scene and did a series of brief interviews. RTÉ crime correspondent Paul Reynolds was at the scene and had acceded to a Garda request to not name Mr Carthy or give personal details about him.
It was not clear when Mr O'Flynn became aware of the Garda request but he told Garda spokesman Supt John Farrelly moments before his package was broadcast that Mr Carthy would be named. Supt Farrelly expressed strong disapproval but Mr O'Flynn said it was too late to change.
Mr Justice Barr said he had no doubt that Mr O'Flynn had "a clear duty to consult with Supt Farrelly in good time and to radically restructure his programme in the light of the probable response he would have received from the police".
Even if there was not enough time to restructure the item it was "highly unlikely that there would have been any real difficulty in postponing it until later in a two-hour programme", Mr Justice Barr said.
Mr O'Flynn had told the tribunal he did not think he knew that Mr Carthy had depression when he broadcast that interview. However, Mr Justice Barr said: "It is not credible that Mr O'Flynn . . . who had spent six hours at the scene investigating events at Abbeylara, did not learn from any of the large number of media personnel present or from locals who he interviewed . . .that John Carthy was suffering from depression."
He continued: "Mr O'Flynn's conduct seems to indicate the likelihood of a desire on his part to steal a march on his news colleagues in RTÉ and the media generally by titillating his Five Seven Live audience with some details of John Carthy's recent unhappy love life and to suggest that a lost intimate relationship might be revived."
RTÉ had submitted that TV3 should also be investigated by the tribunal, as it had broadcast some personal details about Mr Carthy. Mr Justice Barr rejected this because the tribunal had received a complaint only about the Five Seven Live broadcast and RTÉ had raised the issue too late.
Mr Justice Barr also repeated his finding that a 2004 Sunday Independent article detailing a rift in the Carthy family was "untrue, incomplete and misleading" and had probably been orchestrated by an unidentified garda to support the Garda case. He said there was insufficient evidence to establish "beyond reasonable doubt"whether Garda parties or Garda representative bodies had been complicit in providing this information to the reporter.
Last night RTÉ issued a brief statement. It said: "As a result of its involvement in the Barr tribunal investigation, RTÉ has reviewed, and where necessary modified, its editorial reporting structures and practices in order to ensure that RTÉ's reporting of similarly sensitive situations meets the highest standards."
