O’Brien loses appeal to Supreme Court over Dáil statements
‘Chilling effect’ on freedom of speech
THE Supreme Court has dismissed Denis O’Brien’s long-running legal battle to censure members of a Dáil committee for comments they made about him.
The 60-year-old tycoon was unhappy that the Dáil’s Committee on Procedures and Privileges (CPP) had decided that remarks by Social Democrat Catherine Murphy and Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty were justified in the ‘expression of free speech’.
He wanted the courts to mark ‘disapproval’ of the comments instead, as he believed that their Dáil speeches breached his privacy rights.
The saga dates back to May 2015 when he secured a court injunction to stop RTÉ broadcasting a TV news report about his alleged arrangements with IBRC, the former Anglo Irish Bank, linked to a €315million loan.
After that injunction was served on RTÉ, Ms Murphy and Mr Doherty made speeches under Dáil privilege on the topic the national broadcaster had intended to cover.
Mr O’Brien then launched proceedings against the CPP, the clerk of the Dáil – who represents all 158 TDs – and the State.
In the High Court, State lawyers had argued that Mr O’Brien could not rely on his right to privacy or his right of access to the courts to ‘pole-vault’ over the Constitution and sue the entire Dáil.
He lost that case in the High Court in March 2017, when Judge Úna Ní Raifeartaigh said the court orders he sought could have a ‘chilling effect’ on freedom of speech generally.
But he launched a Supreme Court appeal that was heard in the Four Courts last year, in which he complained about the way in which his complaint about the two deputies had been dealt with by the CPP in June 2015.
A seven-judge court sitting in NUI Galway’s Aula Maxima yesterday announced their ruling in favour of the national parliament.
Chief Justice Frank Clarke and six other judges upheld the High Court’s March 2017 decision, saying that to rule in Mr O’Brien’s favour would be ‘impermissible under the Constitution’.
Due to the separation of powers between the Dáil and the courts, ‘any rights which may allegedly be infringed can only be protected by the Oireachtas and not by the courts,’ the judges said.
Their 42-page ruling concluded: ‘The challenge which Mr O’Brien has sought to bring to the decision of the CPP involves – in substance – an indirect or collateral challenge to the utterances of the deputies themselves.’
It’s Mr O’Brien’s second setback in the courts in the past week.
On Friday, he lost a month-long libel action against the Sunday Business Post newspaper over an article that described him as one of the biggest borrowers from Irish banks at the time of the financial crash.
A jury of eight men and three women rejected his defamation case in its entirety.