A senior Department of Justice official is threatening to sue a refugee newsletter. Solicitors for Mr Dermot Cole, an assistant secretary at the Department of Justice, say the article by the writer and actor, Mr Donal O'Kelly, defames their client. In a letter sent last Thursday, they demanded an apology by the following day.
Solicitors for the editor of the newsletter of the Association of Refugees and Asylum-seekers in Ireland, Ms Josephine Olusola, have replied to say the deadline for an apology was "quite unrealistic". It was pointed out that Mr O'Kelly has been away on holiday.
The letter from Crowley Millar, solicitors, for Mr Cole, says the article in ARASI's July newsletter "contains comments which are defamatory of our client both in their publication and in their innuendo".
The article also contains several critical references to the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue.
Mr Cole (45) was for many years one of the main officials responsible for implementing asylum and immigration policies and drawing up new regulations. Last October he drew up a report on the granting of 11 passports to a group of Saudi Arabians and Pakistanis by the former minister for justice, Mr Ray Burke.
In 1989 he lost a libel action against a trade union official and Mr Pat Kenny, which related to a radio interview three years earlier about an alleged dispute at Mountjoy Prison.
Mr O'Kelly (40) has won awards at the Edinburgh Festival for his one-man play Catalpa and for an adaptation of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. His play Asylum!Asylum!, written in 1994, was highly critical of Ireland's asylum policies.
