Press council will be good for citizens - and for newspapers

THE recent controversy over newspaper coverage of the circumstances surrounding the death of Liam Lawlor highlights the ongoing need for an effective mechanism for dealing with inaccurate or unfair reporting in the newspapers.

At the moment, members of the public are left with no effective form of redress in relation to such reporting apart from taking a libel action to the courts.

However, the courts are a prohibitively costly route for most people to take and are not an appropriate means for addressing simple errors or mistakes made by newspapers.