Like most people who know John Waters, I was very glad that he won his libel case last week against the Sunday Times. The article he objected to was nasty and indefensible, writes Fintan O'Toole.
The implication it contained that he would be an unsympathetic father to his daughter was, as anyone even slightly acquainted with John would know, so far from the truth that it did not even occupy the same galaxy.
Defeat, moreover, would have been personally devastating and financially ruinous for him.
And yet, I wish he hadn't taken the case in the first place. The current libel laws are very bad for Irish public life, and few objective observers disagree with the need for radical reform.
One of the reasons the pressure for that reform is so weak, however, is that the public tends to see the issue as just another case of an elite profession trying to serve its own interests. Nothing confirms that impression as powerfully as well-known journalists using the libel laws.
A simple fact of this business is that journalists occasionally make mistakes. It is very easy for a passionate argument to cross the line that separates necessary polemic from unfair attack. Even when the writer is trying to be careful, an implication or allegation that ought not to be made can slip through the net of caution. This happens from time to time to every columnist, including John.
In the current of issue of Magill, for example, John commits what is, under the current laws, what seems to me to be a virtually indefensible libel. He is writing about Edna O'Brien's new novel, In the Forest, and criticising an article I wrote about it in which I questioned the need for the author to make explicit reference to the Brendan O'Donnell murders. This is a good thing to argue about, since the book raises a large range of moral and aesthetic questions.
In the course of his article, however, John makes a damaging allegation. On three separate occasions he states, as a matter of indisputable fact, that I hadn't read In the Forest when I wrote the article in question. He repeatedly underlines this claim which, if it were true, would undermine not just my argument but my general credibility. It would lead the reader to conclude that I am a chancer, who is not fit to do the job for which I'm paid.
It is, of course, untrue. John has simply made an honest mistake, based, presumably, on the fact that I didn't refer to Edna O'Brien's text in the article I wrote.
He doesn't know, perhaps, that advance copies of books are supplied to the media by publishers on condition that the contents not be referred to before the publication date. I could refer only to what was already in the public domain, even though my judgments were shaped by a reading of the full text.
However - and this is the point of raising what may seem to be a private issue of no interest to anyone but myself - what if John's allegation had been true? It would, arguably, have been a matter of some public importance. Well-known critics shouldn't be going around pontificating about books they haven't read. Yet, precisely because the allegation would have been both personally embarrassing and professionally damaging, the overwhelming logic would have been for me to sue for libel.
My solicitor would have written a thunderous letter to Magill, detailing my private devastation, the grief of my wife, the humiliation of my children, the outrage of my employers, the people spitting at me in the streets and the loss of the magnificent future income which I had been just on the point of securing.
Magill's solicitors would have asked John whether the allegation was true, and when he told them it was, they would have said: "Prove it." And here John would have been stuck. You simply can't prove in a court of law that a person had not read a certain book at a certain time.
John, although right, would have had no case. He would have been strongly advised to settle. And since my lawyers would have Magill over a barrel, with the awful prospect of huge court costs looming ahead, they would have screwed the magazine for an outrageous amount of money.
The end-result would be that I, the chancer and liar who had deceived readers of The Irish Times, would be sunning myself in my new apartment in Marbella. I would also be able to carry on my unprofessional habits of not reading books I wrote about, knowing that, with my victory secured over Magill, every other media outlet would be terrified to even hint at what a lazy and corrupt poseur I really was.
This system stinks. For every case that vindicates the innocent, there are 10 that protect the guilty and 20 that reward the opportunist. The most important victims, moreover, are not the journalists, but the public who are deprived of information they need.
It is not hard to devise a system in which honest mistakes can be quickly corrected, public issues can be investigated, robust debate can be protected and genuinely malicious attacks severely punished. What is hard is to convince the public that journalists believe in these principles even when they themselves are offended by other people's journalism.