Madam, - The recent controversy over newspaper coverage of the circumstances surrounding the death of Liam Lawlor highlights the need for an effective mechanism to deal with inaccurate or unfair reporting in the newspapers.
At the moment, members of the public are left with no effective form of redress in relation to such reporting apart from taking a libel action to the courts. However, the courts are a prohibitively costly route for most people to take and are not an appropriate means for addressing simple errors.
All of us in the media business know that the system of readers' representatives, established to deal with such matters, is - with the honourable exception of The Irish Times - effectively non-existent. As a result, getting corrections made or rights of reply published can often take a lot of time and persistence and sometimes requests for corrections of factual inaccuracies are simply ignored or palmed off.
Because of this experience it is not surprising that a recent survey of the country's public relations practitioners showed that 75 per cent want to see the immediate introduction of legislation providing for the appointment of a press ombudsman and the establishment of a press council. In this context, as president of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland (PRII), I want to welcome the Minister for Justice's statement last Monday, in which he promised that such legislation would be published before Christmas.
We in the PRII believe its speedy enactment and implementation will be good for our citizens and will be good for our newspapers. - Yours, etc,
PAT MONTAGUE, President, Public Relations Institute of Ireland, Merrion Square, Dublin 2.