The Gerry Adams libel case against the BBC may end up costing the organisation about two to three years’ worth of Gary Lineker’s salary and a ton of grief. A High Court judge yesterday directed the BBC to pay €50,000 damages, plus €250,000 legal costs to Adams, pending a possible appeal by the broadcaster.
Ironically, the talking points raised by the case may be a fine example of the BBC performing its Reithian duty: to inform, educate and even entertain – as jury and courtroom observers were, by all accounts. Amid High Court hauteur, any faintly witty response can seem Wildean.
Talking points might include the notion of “putting manners” on investigative journalists, as Adams put it, or the question of whether juries – normally beyond criticism – are a help or a hindrance in defamation cases. Or the fascinating matter of forum shopping and specifically why Adams took his case in this jurisdiction.
He had every right to do so, of course, as the disputed BBC Northern Ireland Spotlight programme, broadcast in 2016, attracted 15,800 viewers in the Republic. (When former Scottish leader Alex Salmond’s chatshow on Russian TV debuted with just 16,000 viewers in the UK in 2017, it was widely mocked for attracting fewer viewers than the wildlife series Ten Deadliest Snakes.)
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Spotlight’s 10.45pm slot on a Tuesday night may have been partly to blame for the low viewership in the Republic. Even with the seductive title – A Spy in the IRA – there was clearly minimal interest in the blood vendetta against Denis Donaldson, the former Sinn Féin/IRA member who was eventually outed as an informer for MI5 and the PSNI’s special branch. He was found shot dead on April 4th, 2006.
Donaldson’s daughter, Jane Donaldson, was not permitted to tell the jury that the family never believed the Real IRA’s claim that it killed her father. The claim – from a single source, three years after the murder – “didn’t correlate with an awful lot of the sensitive and confidential information we’d gathered from the gardaí”, she said.
Did it matter to the libel case if Adams was also in the IRA, as he has always denied? Mr Justice Alexander Owens ruled that it was not a question for the jury and refused to allow it to be put directly to Adams. The BBC could only present evidence that Adams had a reputation for being in the IRA, not that he was in the IRA. The mostly young jury – aged between 25 and 35, some hardly born at the time of the Belfast Agreement – were told by the judge that “a person’s reputation can change” and they should “evaluate” it as of “2016 and now”.
We can never have timely insight into how or why they reached their verdict
Now that’s a talking point of enduring and universal interest. It implies that, with time, even the most savage deeds of historical figures cease to be an integral part of their reputations and inevitably become romanticised as context and nuance fade out.
The judge instanced the aftermath of the Irish Civil War (over 100 years ago) as an analogy for how the reputations of participants in historical events change over time. The question is how much time. Thirty, 40, 50 years ago is well within living memory. Young people, quite reasonably, don’t wish to dwell on horrific events considered relatively recent by their elders. They may, therefore, assess a reputation by the emotion roused by a song, a chant, a movie-style back story or even by redemptive decisions taken in later life. How that might be interpreted by the bereaved still seeking accountability is what gives it universal interest.
For all those reasons, it would have been very civic-minded of Adams if he had chosen his and Denis Donaldson’s home patch for his momentous case against the BBC. Taking the case was all about “putting manners on the British Broadcasting Corporation”, he told reporters. “The British Broadcasting Corporation upholds the ethos of the British state in Ireland and in my view it’s out of sync in many, many fronts with the Good Friday Agreement.”
Going by those remarks, the obvious place to air his grievances against a British broadcaster would have been in Belfast, which still holds its secrets tight. It would certainly have been speedier, with the potential for a much higher award since the programme undoubtedly had many more viewers in Northern Ireland to infer bad things about the plaintiff’s reputation.
But at a crudely results-driven level, there was no mystery about it at all, given the Republic’s unusually plaintiff-friendly libel laws. The BBC Spotlight reporter, Jennifer O’Leary, distilled the nuance of the problem when she said she had “nothing to hide, only sources to protect”. When people still live in fear for their lives, how is it possible to square the defence of honest opinion with protecting the identity of sources while making it compelling for a jury?
Regardless of the flaws or strengths of a case, while the Republic still has juries in defamation cases, we can never have timely insight into how or why they reached their verdict. In Northern Ireland, such cases are heard before judges who must provide a written judgment or explanation of their decision.
Instead, what we’re left with is the line about “putting manners” on a broadcaster that, for over 50 years, has resourced ground-breaking Spotlight investigations carrying multiple levels of risk from paramilitary factions.
I’m old enough to remember how both the BBC and ITN - in the teeth of British government lies and cover-ups - doggedly, courageously and expensively investigated the 1988 SAS killing of three members of an active IRA unit in Gibraltar. Against ferocious government pressure and hysterical accusations of bias towards terrorists, both ITN and the unmannerly British Broadcasting Corporation went ahead and aired their damning findings anyway.
Their journalism deserves something more than contempt from a man who has been around long enough to know that heroism takes many forms.
