Privacy law moves may be abandoned, says Lenihan

MOVES to bring in sweeping new privacy laws may be abandoned if newspapers prove they can police themselves, Justice Minister Brian Lenihan last night insisted.

Mr Lenihan said he wanted to see how the new Press Council watchdog operates before deciding whether to introduce a controversial Privacy Bill. The minister said he would move ahead with defamation reforms which have generally been welcomed by the media, despite Cabinet colleagues wanting privacy laws introduced at the same time.

“In relation to the Privacy Bill, I would be prepared to give media organisations some time to show that the Press Council can work and demonstrate its effectiveness,” he told RTÉ’s The Week In Politics.

“What a lot of people want, and this is not just about public figures, this is about private reputations as well, everyone wants to see justice done speedily. Telling someone they have a libel action in seven years’ time isn’t of much value to a person who has been seriously defamed and wronged in the eyes of the community.”

The minister said the defamation bill was a much-needed reform, as he acknowledged tension between politicians and the media. “It is time to enact definitive legislation that will strike the balance between the protection of reputation, which is an absolute, and the other absolute, freedom of expression in a free society. We have to draw the line right on this.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern said he was one of the members of the last Cabinet who wanted to link together the defamation and privacy laws.

“I was very much in favour of that,” he said, “because I believe that, while the public might not have engaged with this, they understand themselves that it’s their privacy, it’s not just politicians.”

Mr Ahern said he was always suspicious of self-regulation and that a big test for the Press Council will be how it handles the case of Julia Kushnir, who was last week awarded substantial damages over newspaper reports regarding the death of Liam Lawlor.

Fine Gael health spokesman Dr James Reilly said the Privacy Bill proposed by the last Government was far too restrictive.

“It looked to many people to be a way for ministers to protect themselves from criticism.

“God knows this is a time when we need less censorship not more and we saw what happened to John Crown last Friday night,” he said, referring to the controversy over RTÉ dropping the cancer expert from the Late Late Show.