Courts

John Waters cannot ‘go around defaming people’, hearing told

Judgment reserved in case where Kitty Holland of The Irish Times is suing over comments made in 2017

Irish Times journalist Kitty Holland and her father Eamonn McCann leaving the Four Courts. Photograph: Collins Courts

Colm Keena
Wed May 1 2024 - 21:00

It was “patent nonsense” for retired journalist John Waters to seek to defend himself on the basis that an allegedly defamatory statement about journalist Kitty Holland was his honestly held opinion, Dublin Circuit Civil Court has heard.

Shane English, barrister for Ms Holland, was speaking on the fifth and final day of the hearing, where his client is suing Mr Waters for comments made at a 2017 event in Tullamore, Co Offaly, which were also posted in a video on Facebook.

After hearing closing submissions from both sides, Judge John O’Connor said he would deliver his judgment on July 3rd. He got assurances from counsel for both sides that his independence was accepted. During the hearing there have been references to comments made by third parties online about the proceedings.

Ms Holland, Social Affairs Correspondent with The Irish Times, of Ranelagh, Dublin, is suing Mr Waters, of Sandycove, Dublin, over comments made about a report in The Irish Times in 2012 which disclosed the death of Savita Halappanavar at University Hospital Galway.

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The report had a huge influence, Mr Waters has said, on Irish people’s attitude towards abortion and persuaded many people to vote in favour of the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution in 2018.

He told the Tullamore event that no doctor had produced a case where a mother had died because she had not been given an abortion. “Savita Halappanavar is the closest they have come. We know that’s a lie. We know it’s a lie that resulted in the journalist who started the lie getting multiple awards from her colleagues,” he said.

Mr Waters has accepted his words were a reference to Ms Holland, but said he had not called her a liar. Rather, he said, she had “started the lie” with the report in The Irish Times.

Mr English, in his submission, said the judge must decide what Mr Waters’s words meant to the ordinary reasonable reader.

“No one is suggesting that John Waters does not have a right to freedom of speech,” Mr English said. However, he said Mr Waters could not “go around defaming people”.

He said Mr Waters was not entitled to the defence of honest opinion, as an honest opinion “must be based on fact”. If someone said a named politician was corrupt and then put forward the defence that it was their honest opinion and “that was the end of it . . . we all know that is patent nonsense”.

Mr English questioned the proposition that Mr Waters’s comments were not motivated by malice, given that Mr Waters had repeated his view during an interview with campaigner Gemma O’Doherty on January 24th last.

He said that if the court decides the comments were defamatory it followed that they were damaging. Judge O’Connor said the issue of damage to Ms Holland was relevant to the size of any award that might be made. Mr English agreed.

Feargal Kavanagh SC, for Mr Waters, said a person had a right to free speech and to express their views even if they were unpopular. Mr Waters’s motivation was that he was “sticking up for the muted voice of the unborn child”.

Referring to Ms Holland, he said his client “never called her a liar. He was always talking about the story”. Citizens had a duty to speak out about “unjust laws”, he said, or “you step down the merry road to tyranny”.

Colm Keena

Colm Keena

Colm Keena is an Irish Times journalist. He was previously legal-affairs correspondent and public-affairs correspondent

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