The High Court has struck out some of the defamatory meanings pleaded by a woman suing Independent Star Limited over a 2016 Irish Daily Star article, but left other meanings in place for any eventual trial.
In a judgment delivered on 26 November 2021, Mr Justice Cian Ferriter considered the newspaper’s application under section 14(1)(a) of the Defamation Act 2009. The company asked the court to strike out pleaded meanings that the article portrayed the plaintiff as a criminal, involved in serious criminal activity, a member of a gangland feud, or willing or likely to commit murder. It did not seek to strike out meanings that she had links with gangland criminals or criminal gangs.
The article, published on 27 April 2016, reported that a woman who had left Ireland was threatened and told to help the Kinahan gang kill her partner or be killed herself. The plaintiff was not named. She pleaded that readers with knowledge of her relationship with Keith Murtagh and her time in Australia could identify her. She denied fleeing Ireland, being threatened by the gang, or being asked to kill her partner. The company denied that she was identifiable and disputed that the article was defamatory.
The judge said the application was not for the court to decide the article’s meaning, but to determine the outer limits of meanings a reasonable reader could attribute to it. The question was whether it would be wholly unreasonable for a jury to find the pleaded meanings.
Justice Ferriter ruled that it was possible for a jury to find meanings that the plaintiff had links or close ties with criminal gangs. He also allowed the meanings that she was a criminal or involved in serious criminal activity to remain. He said a jury could consider the article alongside the pleaded background information about her relationship with Murtagh and her time in Australia, and could find that the alleged links made her complicit to some degree in criminal activity. Those meanings might not ultimately succeed, he said, but could not be ruled out at this stage.
The court struck out meanings that the plaintiff was herself a gangland criminal or gang member, had a propensity to commit serious crimes such as murder, was amenable to being approached to commit murder, or had been asked by criminal gangs to murder on their behalf. The judge concluded those interpretations fell outside the possible range of meanings a reasonable reader could take from the article.
The ruling addressed only which pleaded meanings could proceed. It did not determine whether the plaintiff was identifiable, whether the article was defamatory in any surviving meaning, or the merits of the company’s pleaded defence. No trial outcome or damages decision is given in the judgment excerpt.