EUROPE

Irish Media, Fearing Lawsuits, Steers Clear of a Billionaire

By STEPHEN CASTLE and DOUGLAS DALBYMAY 29, 2015

Denis O’Brien. His dispute with RTE, the Irish broadcaster, led the news media to bypass a story. CreditLucas Jackson/Reuters

LONDON — When the financial crash hit in 2008, it plunged Ireland into a crippling recession from which it has only recently stirred. But the toxic legacy of those years has not gone away, and now it has provoked another crisis, this time over media freedom.

A clash between one of Ireland’s richest and best-known businessmen, Denis O’Brien, and the national broadcasting company, RTE, has reopened wounds from the crash, raising questions about conflicts of interest at the top of Irish society, and about constraints on the country’s media.

At stake is whether journalists should report disputed allegations about some of the past financial dealings of Mr. O’Brien, a billionaire who amassed a fortune in the cellphone sector and has extensive media interests.

The issue peaked on Thursday when an Irish lawmaker, Catherine Murphy, made claims in the Irish Parliament, the Dail, about relations between Mr. O’Brien and a publicly run financial institution.

Such speeches are normally covered by parliamentary privilege and can therefore be published and reported on without risk of a libel suit. Not this time. While Ms. Murphy’s comments were made public on Parliament’s website, the Irish media largely avoided repeating them.

That was because Mr. O’Brien’s lawyers argued that they were covered by an earlier injunction taken out to prevent RTE from reporting Mr. O’Brien’s relationship with the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, a body now being wound down, which replaced Anglo Irish Bank after it failed during the crash.

To some politicians the battle represents a challenge to basic Constitutional freedoms, and Micheal Martin, the leader of the opposition Fianna Fail party, called for Parliament to be recalled next week to debate the matter.

“It is unprecedented that a matter of serious public interest raised in the Dail cannot be aired or reported on by the national broadcaster and other media outlets,” Mr. Martin said in a statement on Friday.

“This sets an extremely dangerous precedent,” he added. “The Constitution gives a clear role to the Dail in terms of freedom of speech and privilege. The silencing of the national broadcaster and other media outlets in relation to Dail business is a grave development and it must be addressed without delay.”

In an interview with RTE, Mr. O’Brien’s spokesman, James Morrissey, rejected the claims. “I think that Dail privilege most certainly has a very, very important role in our society and in our democracy,” he said.

“But I don’t think it should be allowed be used, or abused, where falsehoods are represented or misrepresented as facts, as has happened in the Dail in the last 24 hours.”

Mr. O’Brien is arguably the biggest player in Ireland’s media landscape, and his Independent News & Media group controls the Irish Independent as well as the Irish Daily Star, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday World, Dublin’s Evening Herald and regional newspapers.

According to Eoin O’Dell, associate professor of law at Trinity College Dublin, there was legally nothing to prevent Irish media from reporting the allegations made in Parliament.

But the situation may look different, he said, if litigation is threatened and “if you are a legal adviser to a media company staring down the barrel of a possible half-million-euro losses.”

“It requires media outlets to stand up and be counted,” Mr. O’Dell said. Because RTE still has legal action pending on the issue, he said, “it has done that, and I would like to see others do that too.”

The discussion is important to the wider public because Irish taxpayers ended up paying a heavy price for the country’s decision to bail out the banks, which had lent heavily during a property bubble that burst.

Ireland eventually received an international bailout of €67.5 billion, about $89 billion at the time, which left taxpayers picking up the tab for the banks.

In her speech in Parliament, Ms. Murphy claimed that Mr. O’Brien effectively received a big subsidy thanks to favorable terms provided by the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, which was publicly run at the time.

“I understand that Mr. O’Brien was enjoying a rate of approximately 1.25 percent when IBRC could, and arguably should, have been charging 7.5 percent,” she said.

“Given that we are talking about outstanding sums of upwards of €500 million, the interest rate applied is not an insignificant issue for the public interest,” Ms. Murphy said.

Such allegations speak to a suspicion in Ireland that a small and closely knit financial elite had operated informal networks well away from public view.

Yet in his RTE interview, Mr. Morrissey challenged the critics of Mr. O’Brien, asking, “Would you like to see your banking matters being published in a newspaper? I wouldn’t. And I think the vast majority of people wouldn’t.

“If there is wrongdoing involved — let that be examined and investigated,” he continued. “But until such, as there’s a view that there is wrongdoing involved, then a person is entitled to their good reputation,” he said.

Ireland’s National Union of Journalists argued that other principles were at stake.

Constraints on the media raised “fundamental questions about our parliamentary democracy and the right of the media to report freely on parliamentary proceedings,” said its secretary general, Seamus Dooley, in a statement.

“Faith in the media’s ability to do its job will be shattered if this challenge is not faced head-on,” he said, describing it as “a defining moment for the media in Ireland.”