Walsh ‘vindicated’ by €500k settlement
Mr Walsh sued The Sun’s publishers, Newsgroup Newspapers, for defamation which arose out of false allegations made by Leonard Watters.
In January, Mr Watters, aged 24, from Navan in Co Meath, was sentenced to six months in jail after pleading guilty to making false reports to gardaí that Mr Walsh groped him in a toilet in a Dublin nightclub on Apr 9, 2011.
Yesterday, Declan Doyle SC, for Mr Walsh, told High Court president Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns that the defamation case had been settled.
Mr Walsh was in court while an apology was read on behalf of the paper by Eoin McCullough SC, who said that, in its editions of Jun 23, 2011, The Sun reported Mr Walsh was being investigated in relation to a sexual assault on Mr Watters.
It transpired that the allegation was false, and The Sun fully accepted the alleged assault did not take place and that Mr Walsh is “entirely innocent”.
“The Sun unreservedly apologises to Mr Walsh for the distress caused to him as a result of this article,” the apology stated
Afterwards, Mr Walsh’s solicitor, Paul Tweed, revealed The Sun has agreed to pay €500,000 in damages plus costs.
Mr Walsh said he was “very relieved” and he would not have wished for what happened to him on his worst enemy.
“This has had a terrible effect on me,” he said. “It was all lies. And I’m very satisfied with this total vindication for me, but I remain very angry at the treatment I received at the hands of The Sun.”
Although the perpetrator has been convicted for concocting the allegations, this did not stop the story being spread all around the world as a result of The Sun, said Mr Walsh.
Mr Tweed said the case was “a prime example” of the serious damage that can be inflicted on any individual by the publication of allegations that can “circumnavigate the globe in a matter of seconds”.
The consequences of worldwide dissemination online of a defamatory story is “a fundamental problem”, said Mr Tweed, adding that he hoped the Leveson report in Britain would address “the principle that prevention is always better than cure”.
“We are not trying to gag the press or stop investigations, but if there was a strong body that we could have rung before to get them to stop the story for 24 hours, we could have provided proof that Louis wasn’t even in the place at the time,” said Mr Tweed.
In his action, Mr Walsh alleged that, on June 15, 2011, Mr Watters met with Sun journalist Joanne McElgunn in the Newbridge Hotel, Navan.
She offered to pay him a sum of money if he agreed to make a complaint to gardaí about “about being assaulted”.
Five days later, it was alleged, Mr Watters met Ms McElgunn again and he was “encouraged and enticed by her, on behalf of the defendant, to repeat the false statements” for publication in The Sun.
Mr Walsh said he was aware Ms McElgunn, on behalf of the paper, paid him €700 and promised further payment after the story was printed.
