The Supreme Court has reversed the Court of Appeal’s order in Martin McDonagh’s defamation case against Sunday Newspapers Limited, ruling that the appellate court had wrongly replaced a jury’s factual assessment with its own. It has not made a final order on whether the case must return for further consideration of damages or other issues.
The case arose from a September 1999 Sunday World article linking McDonagh to drug dealing and illegal moneylending. At a 2008 High Court trial, the newspaper relied on a defence of justification, which required it to prove the allegations. The jury found that the newspaper had not proved McDonagh was a drug dealer or loan shark. It found that tax evasion and criminality had been proved. The jury did not answer a further question about whether the unproved allegations materially injured his reputation, and assessed damages at €900,000.
In 2015, the Court of Appeal set aside the High Court order. It dismissed McDonagh’s drug-dealing defamation claim, finding as a fact that he was a drug dealer, and sent the loan-sharking claim back for retrial. It also ordered him to repay the €900,000 and pay appeal costs and two-thirds of the High Court costs.
The Supreme Court held that the Court of Appeal had no proper basis to decide that the evidence permitted only one factual conclusion. The jury had heard the witnesses, and the evidence allowed competing interpretations. The Supreme Court said an appellate court should not substitute its view for a jury’s where evidence supports the jury’s conclusion. It found no exceptional circumstances that justified overturning the verdict in this case.
The judgment also addressed the limited cross-examination of gardaí about interview notes recording statements attributed to McDonagh. The Court said counsel should have put the basic reasons for disputing those accounts to the witnesses. But, considering the trial as a whole, it concluded that this shortcoming did not make the trial so unsatisfactory that a retrial was required.
The Court further rejected the proposition that the constitutional protection for freedom of expression gives the media an automatic right to publish defamatory material merely because it is true. In a justification defence, the publisher bears the burden of proving the defamatory facts on the balance of probabilities.
The Supreme Court said the Court of Appeal’s order was wrong and had to be reversed in full. Because the jury left its second question unanswered and nearly 18 years had passed since the article, the Court proposed hearing counsel on whether another hearing was needed on that question, damages or a rehearing in the High Court. The judgment did not resolve those next steps.