Ex-minister’s libel case due to ‘wounded pride after losing Dáil seat’
Paper defends running ‘Coffey the Robber’ article
THE libel claim by a former junior minister has been dismissed as wounded pride by lawyers for the newspaper he is suing.
Rossa Fanning SC, for the Kilkenny People, said Senator Paudie Coffey had launched the High Court action as that was ‘the only thing that would give hi m t he f i nancial compensation he’s now asking you to give him’.
However, lawyers for Mr Coffey, who was appointed a senator by former taoiseach Enda Kenny after he lost his Dáil seat, said the article had crossed the line over fake news.
The Waterford politician is suing t he Kilkenny People publishers Iconic Newspapers over an article branding him ‘Coffey the Robber’.
He claims it led to him being ridiculed in the street and partly contributed to him losing his seat at the last general election.
The article had come from a press release by Mr Coffey’s Fine Gael colleague Kilkenny-Carlow TD John Paul Phelan and it referred to a notorious 18th Century Waterford highwayman William Crotty, known as ‘Crotty the Robber’.
During closing speeches yester- day, Mr Fanning told jurors that Senator Coffey’s pride was merely wounded by the article, and he had suffered no ‘detectable damage’ to his reputation.
Mr Coffey’s real problem was that in 2016, following publica- tion of the piece, he lost his Dáil seat and then lost the election to the Seanad too, meaning he ‘dropped two rungs on the political ladder’, Mr Fanning argued.
Ultimately, he was nominated to the Seanad by Mr Kenny.
By the end of 2016, when Mr Coffey instructed his legal team to bring a court action, ‘ he has more time on his hands, he’s no longer a minister, he’s a senator, and he instructs the bringing of these legal proceedings’, Mr Fanning said. There was no ‘deliberate hatchet job’ as the article was published in good faith on ‘a matter of public interest’, he said.
He added that Mr Coffey did not go to the Press Ombudsman or ‘have a word to JP Phelan’.
However, Mr Coffey’s barrister Richard Kean SC said the newspaper had ‘crossed the line with regard to fake news’, as it has claimed that i ts article was merely a ‘joke or parody’ piece.
He said the newspaper is not a comic like ‘Dandy or the Beano’, adding: ‘ Where are the other jokes in this newspaper?… They want to convince you this fake news is some sort of satire. Joking is not a defence to a defamation action.’ He claimed the paper had ‘engaged in character assassination of my client and it gets to very low levels’.
He should collect significant damages as a result of the Kilkenny People article, Mr Kean said. He added that his client was not ‘spoofing’ when he broke down in tears while testifying and that he was a ‘simple family man’ whose character was assassinated by the article.
Mr Coffey was accused in court, on the first day of the trial last month, of ‘taking himself far too seriously,’ Mr Kean said. But he was ‘putting his life on the line’ by taking the case and ‘the idea that a politician like Senator Coffey should stay quiet is absurd.’
The article came about as in 2016 as Mr Coffey was then the junior housing minister and was involved in a boundary review which proposed moving part of Kilkenny county into Waterford city. Mr Phelan had claimed in the article that Mr Coffey was ‘robbing chunks of south Kilkenny’ through the review.
Mr Coffey has told the court that he is ‘still suffering everywhere I go’.
This morning, Judge Bernard Barton will give his summing up to the jury before sending them out to consider their verdict.
‘He dropped two rungs in the ladder’