The High Court refused applications by a nursing director and the owners of Leas Cross Nursing Home to stop RTÉ broadcasting a programme about care standards and the home’s management. It did, however, grant the owners’ request for an interlocutory order restraining further trespass on the premises while their case proceeds.
The two proceedings were brought on 27 May 2005, ahead of a programme then scheduled for broadcast on 30 May. In a judgment delivered on 8 June, Mr Justice Clarke said the applications concerned only interim relief; the court was not deciding whether the programme’s allegations were true or whether any party was ultimately liable.
The nursing director, Denise Cogley, sought an injunction on defamation grounds. The judge said she had not met the demanding threshold for stopping potentially defamatory material before trial: it had to be clear on the evidence available that she would succeed and that no defence could reasonably succeed. He found that the programme could be viewed as presenting her as trying to address longstanding problems, and that it was not clear she would necessarily establish that its implications about her were unjustified.
The owners, John and Genevieve Aherne and Sovereign Projects Limited, argued that secret filming at the home may have involved trespass and a breach of privacy. The judge considered that they had an arguable case on those issues. He also noted that the programme was intended to protect patients’ identities through pixilation, family consent, or both, and said the evidence gave him no reason to believe those measures would be ineffective.
In refusing to block the broadcast, the judge weighed the circumstances of the filming, the public interest and whether damages could provide a remedy if a wrong were proved at trial. He identified questions about care standards, public funding, regulatory oversight and the adequacy of regulation of nursing homes as matters of very significant public importance. He stressed that those were issues raised by the programme, not findings of fact. The court concluded that the public interest weighed heavily against prior restraint and that damages could be adequate if a wrong were later established.
The separate trespass claim concerned future conduct. The judge found a risk that similar methods might be used if the subject was revisited in later broadcasts. He ordered RTÉ to refrain from further trespass on the owners’ premises pending a full trial, while making clear that this was not a final ruling on the lawfulness of the earlier filming.