The defamation case between Gerry Adams and the BBC has many points of interest, legally and politically, but its implications for journalism have been vastly overstated.
The former Sinn Féin president won in Dublin’s High Court last week because the BBC broadcast a serious allegation against him in a programme that cited only one anonymous source, with no corroboration.
Every news organisation would aspire to do better than this under almost all circumstances.
Part of the BBC’s defence is that it should still have been able to broadcast the claim, aired by its Northern Ireland investigation strand Spotlight in 2016, as a matter of public interest. There are often cases where it is impossible to name sources or publish corroborating evidence. To do so might place people in danger, expose them to prosecution or breach essential promises of confidentiality.
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Irish defamation law allows for a public-interest defence, but this has yet to be used successfully. The BBC is not alone in fearing the law is not working as intended.
[ If Gerry Adams wanted to put manners on the BBC, why not do it in Belfast?Opens in new window ]
Even in a matter of public interest, however, a news organisation should still demonstrate a serious allegation is more than one person’s claim. The BBC said in court it had corroboration from five other confidential sources, but it had not mentioned this in programme, to be fair to Adams. The court was unimpressed by this argument, and little wonder.
The BBC’s final defence was that there must be freedom to report on figures of historical importance and losing to Adams could create a chill factor over investigations into the Troubles. It asked the jury to make no award of damages, even if it found Spotlight’s claim to be untrue.
The best insight into how the BBC handles a mistake comes not from the insinuations of Gerry Adams but from Terry Wogan, a truly great Irishman, who after every crisis would quip: ‘Deputy heads must head roll’
Yet the judge had been clear throughout that the case was not about the Troubles. The jury was instructed to decide if Adams had rehabilitated his reputation sufficiently as a “peacemaker” after the Belfast Agreement for a 2016 allegation about a 2006 murder to damage his reputation.
The jury found it had, although its €100,000 award was on the lower end of what might have been expected. Many Troubles victims will be dismayed to hear Adams described as a peacemaker, but his Troubles reputation remains where it belongs.
Speaking outside court after the verdict, Adams said taking the case was “about putting manners on the British Broadcasting Corporation”.
Seamus Dooley, secretary of the National Union of Journalists, condemned this comment as “chilling”, as well as “unfair and unreasonable”, given Spotlight’s 40-year record of “amazing investigative journalism”.
An Amnesty report this week found Northern Ireland is the most dangerous place in the UK to be a journalist. Public figures have a responsibility not to make matters worse. However, Adams’s remark will not have made much difference to anyone: it was a familiar sort of jibe, to be enjoyed by a harmless republican audience. Only loyalists and dissident republicans pose a physical threat to the media.
Adams added he suspected the BBC had come under “direct political interference” to continue a case it could have settled years earlier with an apology.
It is only slightly facetious to suggest that Sinn Féin has already benefited enough from murky British dealings. What political motivation could there be to press on with a plainly weak case that was almost certain to work out in Adams’s favour?
The obvious explanation is by far the most likely: the BBC pressed on because it is an intractable bureaucracy with no respect for public money. Adams might be familiar with the concept of an organisation that struggles to back down.
There has been a recent, relevant demonstration of this culture within BBC Northern Ireland. In 2023, it reached a confidential settlement in an alleged bullying case with a Spotlight producer, Lena Ferguson. She received an award and costs with no admission of liability.
The BBC then issued a statement congratulating itself.
“We didn’t want to be in a lengthy dispute with Lena and are happy that we can all now move forward,” it said.
Yet the case had dragged out for four years, involving allegations dating back 20 years from Ferguson and others. The problem became serious enough to be raised in the House of Commons.
Many people in the media in Belfast feared Spotlight had become dysfunctional, with implications for the quality of its journalism. They were appalled by the BBC’s legal obstinacy towards Ferguson but hardly surprised.
The best insight into how the BBC handles a mistake comes not from the insinuations of Gerry Adams but from Terry Wogan, a truly great Irishman, who after every crisis would quip: “Deputy heads must roll.”
We may be years away from even that stage of this fiasco.
