The Court of Appeal has dismissed appeals by Sunday Newspapers Limited, Colm MacGinty and Nicola Tallant seeking to strike out claims by Patrick Benedict Gilchrist and Isabel Rogers over alleged statements made to a retired senior garda in March 2014.
The appeals concerned only the plaintiffs’ claims about statements allegedly made by Tallant to John O’Brien on 28 March 2014. The plaintiffs also have claims over a Sunday World article published on 30 March 2014 and related online publication. The defendants did not seek to strike out those other claims in these appeals.
The High Court had refused to strike out the claims about the statements to O’Brien. The defendants appealed, arguing principally that pursuing them would be an abuse of process because the likely benefit to the plaintiffs could be small compared with the costs and court time involved. They relied on the approach taken by English courts in the case known as Jameel.
In a judgment delivered by Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan, the Court of Appeal said Irish authority sets a narrower threshold. A claim may be struck out as an abuse of process where the defendant establishes that the plaintiff would obtain no benefit from pursuing it. The court said Irish courts cannot apply a cost-benefit calculation that weighs a plaintiff’s probable benefit against the likely costs and use of court resources.
The court also noted that the Defamation Act 2009 defines publication for the tort as including publication to one person, and that defamation is actionable without proof of special damage. The fact that the alleged statements were made to one person therefore did not, by itself, rule out a claim.
The defendants’ defences admitted that the statements were made, but pleaded that they were true and published on an occasion of qualified privilege; they also disputed some of the meanings alleged. These were pleaded positions, not findings in the appeals.
The Court of Appeal concluded that the defendants had not established that the claims about the 28 March statements would yield no benefit if successful. It held that pursuing them alongside the other claims was not an abuse of process and dismissed the appeals. It did not decide whether the statements were defamatory or determine the merits of the claims.