A CO DUBLIN man has been ordered to pay his neighbours €30,000 damages for defamation of character and has been permanently restrained from printing untrue and libellous graffiti about them on his gable wall.
Declan Wade, counsel for Thomas and Rosemary Evans, Church Street, Howth, and their companies, Renaissance Products Ltd and Renaissance House Management Company, told the Circuit Civil Court yesterday that their neighbour, Thomas Carlyle, had painted the graffiti claiming that Mr Evans was a fraud and a forger.
He said the graffiti-bearing wall at Carlyle's home, on Church Street, Howth, adjoined the Evanses' property and was visible to the people of Howth and to clients who attended the Evanses' beauty products company.
Mr Carlyle, who represented himself, told the court he was defending the claims of defamation on the basis that what he had printed were true statements which under the Constitution he was granted the freedom to express.
Mr Wade told Judge Jacqueline Linnane that the situation developed between the parties as far back as 1997 and related to Mr Carlyle having obtained permission for four apartments at the former St Mary's Catholic Church in Howth and subsequently Mr Evans having obtained planning permission for the development of St Mary's Parochial Hall.
He said the Evanses would contend that the graphic nature of the graffiti had been a source of extreme humiliation, embarrassment and upset and had arisen out of Mr Carlyle, dissatisfied with the legal process in which the parties had sought injunctions against each other, had taken the law into his own hands.
The graffiti had started off as a small amount of text on the wall but had grown in quantity and size over a period of months.
The Evanses had earlier obtained High Court injunctions restraining Mr Carlyle from placing any further graffiti on the wall and later a mandatory order directing its removal which had been carried out.
Following evidence from both parties, during which Mr Carlyle pleaded justification for having painted the graffiti on the wall, Judge Linnane said she was satisfied the Evans's had been defamed and awarded them €30,000 damages and costs against Carlyle together with a permanent injunction restraining him from repeating the defamation.