The High Court has refused an application by Sunday Newspapers Limited to remove three alleged meanings from Shane Travers’s defamation claim, leaving those questions for a jury at trial.
Mr Justice Hedigan ruled on 15 May 2012 that the newspaper article was reasonably capable of bearing the meanings pleaded by Travers: that he had willingly participated in a bank heist, financially benefited from it, and held undisclosed inside information about it. The ruling addressed only whether those meanings could reasonably arise from the article. It did not determine the article’s actual meaning, whether it was defamatory, or whether any pleaded allegation was true.
The claim concerns an article published in January 2010 under the headline “€7.6m tiger raid was nothing to do with me”. Travers’s statement of claim pleaded five meanings. The newspaper’s application under section 14 of the Defamation Act 2009 targeted three of them: the alleged willing participation, financial benefit and undisclosed information. Two other pleaded meanings concerned his employment suspension and whether he had satisfied his employers that he was not involved; those were not part of this application.
The newspaper argued that the article’s headline and text reported Travers’s denial, his account that he had been forced to help, and his release from Garda custody without charge. It submitted that a reasonable reader would not infer guilt or the three meanings in dispute. Travers argued that the article had to be read as a whole, including a photograph of him beside a Ferrari with the caption “high life”, and that its overall presentation could convey the meanings he pleaded.
The judge applied the approach that a meaning should not be withheld from a jury unless it would be wholly unreasonable to leave it for consideration. He found that the denial in the article did not, by itself, prevent the pleaded meanings from being arguable. The juxtaposition of the photograph and text could arguably suggest that Travers was not to be believed, and the article was capable of conveying the three meanings, he said.
The court therefore refused the newspaper’s application. The decision was an interlocutory ruling on the permissible range of meanings, not a final judgment on the defamation claim. The three meanings remain for the jury to consider at trial.