A High Court judge has agreed to recuse himself from hearing any aspect of defamation proceedings brought by Declan Ganley against RTÉ, after concluding that a reasonable person could question his impartiality on a central issue in the case.
Mr Justice Colm Mac Eochaidh delivered the ruling on 26 April 2016. Mr Ganley’s motion arose from an article the judge wrote for Village magazine about four years before becoming a judge. The article discussed Libertas, the political party founded by Mr Ganley, and its campaign against the Lisbon Treaty in 2008.
The judge’s article described the campaign as based on false claims and questioned what motivated it. In the defamation proceedings, RTÉ’s case was that Mr Ganley had made false claims about matters unrelated to the Lisbon Treaty. His counsel, Declan Doyle SC, submitted that the article could give a reasonable person an apprehension that the judge was not neutral on whether Mr Ganley made false assertions. RTÉ took a neutral position on the recusal motion.
Mac Eochaidh J said the objective-bias test was whether a reasonable person in the circumstances would reasonably apprehend that the plaintiff would not receive a fair hearing from an impartial judge. He accepted that he had alleged that a political campaign in which Mr Ganley played a major role was based on false claims. He said the question was not whether the judge himself felt biased, but whether an informed, objective person could reasonably view him as impartial on the issue.
The judge concluded that a person with full knowledge of the article and the issues in the proceedings could reasonably consider his view of Mr Ganley inimical to the plaintiff’s efforts to overcome RTÉ’s allegation that he was someone who made false claims. That issue was central to the proceedings, he said, and he therefore agreed that he should not preside over any aspect of the case.
Mac Eochaidh J was then in charge of the jury list. He said he might need to deal with minor aspects of the case from time to time and was willing to do so if the plaintiff had no objection and the parties wished it. The ruling concerned recusal only; it did not decide the defamation claim.