‘Mail on Sunday’ found guilty of breaking consumer protection laws
Associated Newspapers (Ireland) (ANI), owners of the Irish Mail on Sunday, was prosecuted by the National Consumer Agency (NCA) at Dublin District Court for breaching consumer protection legislation. The newspaper group has pleaded not guilty to six charges.
The watchdog brought the case against ANI after complaints by readers who bought the “special edition” Irish Mail on Sunday on Feb 6 last thinking they had bought the Sunday Tribune, days after it went into receivership.
Yesterday, Judge Conal Gibbons said he had found ANI guilty on four of the charges.
He noted evidence from witnesses who bought the edition thinking it was the Sunday Tribune and who had felt “duped” and “cheated”. He also noted evidence from retailers and shop employees, who had thought they had been supplied with editions of the newspaper.
He accepted submissions from counsel for ANI, Neil Steen, that his client was a good corporate citizen. However, the judge rejected claims that it was a “trivial” matter and he commended the work of NCA in their handling of the case.
Judge Gibbons said he believed that the Irish Mail on Sunday did not deliberately try to deceive consumers by publishing the misleading special edition.
He accepted that ANI’s managing director Paul Henderson and Irish Mail on Sunday editor Sebastian Hamilton did not intend for newspaper readers to be deceived.
However, he described the decision to run the edition as an “over zealous” marketing exercise to attract former Sunday Tribune readers.
Judge Gibbons said he was applying the Probation Offender’s Act sparing ANI a criminal conviction, on the basis that it paid the NCA’s legal costs and expenses, and donated €15,000 to charity within four weeks. He said the charity should be nominated by the National Union of Journalists, with the view that the money would go to a benevolent fund for journalists.
A receiver was appointed to the loss-making Sunday Tribune on Feb 1 and two days later a decision was made not to bring out a final edition on Feb 6.
The Irish Mail on Sunday then distributed 26,000 “special editions” to shops on the East coast of which about 9,000 were sold.
They featured a wraparound cover with a heading saying “a special edition designed for readers of the Sunday Tribune”.
The defunct paper’s editor Noirin Hegarty had previously told the court that the edition in question looked like the Sunday Tribune and had a similar masthead, fonts and colours.
ANI’s lawyers had submitted that the edition featured fonts used only by the Irish Mail on Sunday and referred to its columnists on the front page.
Earlier, Mr Hamilton had defended the decision to run the edition — saying it was a marketing exercise to gain new readers and not an attempt to mislead people.
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