REGULATING THE MEDIA: The charges were negligence and incompetence, and it is hard to imagine any failings that would do more to destroy the good name of a journalist, writes Fintan O'Toole.
In the dock were two experienced and previously well-respected members of RTÉ's staff. Pádraig Mannion was the presenter of the station's daily Farm Diary, and co-presenter and producer of Farm Week. Joe Murray, his boss, was in charge of all agricultural programming on TV and radio. They were facing, before an internal RTÉ disciplinary hearing, the destruction of their professional reputations. The verdict was "guilty".
Initially, both men were suspended without pay for a week. On appeal, this was changed to a reduction in their salary increments.
As well as the money and the stain on their records, however, the two men had already been humiliated in public.
In February 1989, they had run a story on Farm Diary stating that an unnamed Irish company "has become involved in a meat fraud investigation" in Iraq and that "the Government's export credit insurance facilities may have been abused" by using it to cover non-Irish meat.
This provoked a solicitor's letter on behalf of one such company - Larry Goodman's Anglo-Irish Beef Processors - alleging that it had been libelled in the report. RTÉ, in response, broadcast an extremely long and utterly abject apology to an unnamed company on all news programmes, accepting that the Farm Diary story was entirely without foundation.
The apology was utterly baffling to the vast majority of viewers and listeners. But within RTÉ and the wider journalistic world, two things seemed clear enough.
One was that Pádraig Mannion and Joe Murray had screwed up big time. The other was that allegations of malpractice against meat companies were a dangerous business and that asking questions was asking for trouble.
It subsequently emerged that the Financial Times, Business and Finance magazine and the Farmers's Journal had all been investigating the same story but backed off after RTÉ's grovelling apology.
RTÉ, for its part, was in a tricky situation. In checking out the story over a five-day period, Pádraig Mannion had spoken to sources in the meat trade in Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, to Irish diplomats and sources in the insurance industry. He had put the allegation to the company, which had neither confirmed nor denied it. He had spoken to first-hand witnesses who had seen labels on meat being changed at the port of Aqaba.
He had behaved professionally and worked hard, and he was confident that the story was true. But to prove this in court, the station would have had to summon witnesses from Aqaba and Baghdad - at best an unlikely prospect. Knowing that the story was both well-researched and true and proving it in court were two different things.
Faced with threats from a powerful company that was known to have very good political contacts, RTÉ decided to cut its losses, swallow its pride and grovel. Rather than take the risk of serious libel damages, it sacrificed the reputations of two of its senior journalists. The humiliation of the apologies was taken out on them. Shortly afterwards, Pádraig Mannion left the station.
His fate sums up the ironies of Ireland's media laws. Far from being an incompetent journalist, he had, in fact, broken a story that would resonate in Irish public life right up to last month, when the Goodman empire finally dropped its legal claim against the State, effectively accepting that it had in fact abused the export credit insurance scheme in its dealings with Iraq.
The disavowal of his story, and the scaring off of the rest of the media, preserved the secrecy of a scandal that would finally emerge at the cost of a massively expensive tribunal, helping to bring down two governments in the process.
Nor did the ironies end there. A law intended to protect citizens from the unjust loss of their good name was used to unjustly damage the reputations of two decent professionals. A law intended to guard against the spreading of false stories actually forced the national broadcaster to promulgate a lie.
In its apology, RTÉ stated, as a matter of fact, that no Irish meat company was abusing the export credit insurance scheme.
Although it is particularly stark, the Farm Diary case is by no means unique. In 1990, for example, the libel laws forced the Irish Independent to issue an abject apology to Michael Smurfit for a statement that subsequently turned out to be true - that he had a financial interest in the site in Ballsbridge, Dublin, which Bord Telecom, of which he was then chairman, had purchased for its headquarters.
Fear of libel is also the answer to the question so often asked by the public: "How did Charles Haughey get away with it for so long?"
The reality is that much of the groundwork for an investigation of Haughey's murky finances was laid out by some superb journalism. But, on the stern advice of lawyers, the information was kept out of the public domain.
In 1983, the Evening Press revealed that Haughey had accrued a debt of around £1 million with Allied Irish Banks. The paper then had to carry a statement from AIB claiming that the allegation - which we now know was essentially true - was "outlandishly inaccurate". Faced with this denial, and worried that Mr Haughey might sue, the paper, and the rest of the media, dropped the story.
In her RTÉ television investigation of the collapse of Patrick Gallagher's property empire, Mary Raftery discovered a documented financial link, subsequently fleshed out by the Moriarty tribunal, between the property tycoon and Mr Haughey. The evidence was cut from the programme on legal advice.
Most damningly of all, Frank McDonald's forensic 1985 book, The Destruction of Dublin, teased out Haughey's connections to developers, in particular John Byrne. His accurate description of Des Traynor as Haughey's "bagman" was changed to "close personal friend and financial adviser". Even so, the book was effectively suppressed when the country's leading book distributor refused to handle it for fear of a libel action.
It is not just journalists who were prevented from disclosing vital information. Discussion of a reality that was an open secret in political circles - the corruption of the planning process in Dublin - was quashed by libel threats. When the Labour TD Joan Burton raised the issue in a forceful speech, she immediately received two sets of libel threats - one from a legal firm acting for all the Fine Gael members of Dublin County Council, the other from a firm acting for all the Fianna Fáil councillors.
The letters demanded that Ms Burton and the Irish Independent, which had reported her speech, state publicly that there were "absolutely no grounds to suggest bribery or corruption in Dublin County Council".
All of this can be written now, in retrospect, because journalists persisted and official inquiries were eventually established.
By then, however, a great deal of damage had been done. Voters had been asked to make decisions about Irish politics on the basis of inadequate and sometimes brazenly false information. The democratic process had been seriously distorted.
And this state of affairs continues: the media are still unable to communicate important information to the public, some of which could form the basis for inquiries in 10 years. The tribunal culture remains the other side of the libel coin.
What is particularly striking about all of these cases is that none of them ever went to court. While the public consumes reports of a small number of colourful cases with dramatic clashes of political and journalistic egos, the effect of the libel laws is felt to an overwhelmingly extent behind the scenes.
Articles and scripts, particularly when they refer to high-profile people who are known to be litigious, are scrutinised by lawyers, who point out the dangers. The journalist is asked, not just whether there is good evidence for a claim, but whether that evidence can be produced in any possible court case. And since people who provide information are often vulnerable, the answer is usually "no". So the information is dropped or so obscured by uncontentious language ("close personal friend and financial adviser") that it loses all impact.
When serious information is published or broadcast, a solicitor's letter looking for a retraction, apology and damages may ensue. Sometimes, these letters reflect genuine grievances and react to real journalistic failings.
Often, however, there is no real intention to sue. The hope is that, at best, the story will be dropped or, at worst, the newspaper or station will have to put money and time into preparing a defence for a case that might or might not be taken to court at some stage. Even if the compliant is completely spurious, the cost to the plaintiff is relatively small and the newspaper has no comeback.
All of this has a deadening effect on good journalism. It also has subtler but no less serious consequences. Because good journalism is made so expensive and so risky, the media is tacitly encouraged in the direction of soft-focus, inconsequential stories. In some cases, the space where exciting revelations should be is filled by cheap and nasty sensation.
In the final irony, laws meant to create responsible media help to create a climate of irresponsibility.
Tomorrow: The strange evolution of libel.