Is €600,000 the cost of a free press?

What is the cost of a free press? €600,000 if last week’s Supreme Court judgement is anything to go by. That’s the amount that The Irish Times must pay in legal costs for revealing, in 2006, that the Mahon Tribunal was investigating payments to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern while he was Minister for Finance in 1993.

The story was based on a tribunal document that ended up in the possession of the paper. The tribunal was incensed and accused the paper of undermining its investigation.

Its editor, Geraldine Kennedy, defended the story on the basis that the payments were facts not allegations, that Ahern was moving in the High Court to stop the tribunal’s investigation and because the story was in the public interest.

Summoned before the tribunal and ordered to produce the document on which the story was based, Kennedy and the journalist who wrote the story, Colm Kenna, informed the tribunal that, on legal advice, the document had been destroyed to. (This had the effect of not allowing the court to fine the paper on a daily basis until the document was produced).

Kennedy also took the opportunity to remind the tribunal that it would not have been set up had it not been for leaks to journalists. The tribunal then successfully appealed for a High Court order to compel the journalists to return to the tribunal and answer questions that might identify the source of the document, but this judgment was overturned when the paper appealed it to the Supreme Court.

The cost of all this legal manoeuvring was €600,000 and it was this bill that was given to the paper last week. The Supreme Court held that the paper’s behaviour in destroying the document justified the departure from the normal rule that the losing side – the tribunal – pay the cost of litigation.

It is an understatement to say that this judgment will have a chilling effect on investigative journalism.

Since Joe McAnthony first revealed in 1974 that Ray Burke was on the take the media landscape has been littered with attempts by journalists to expose the underbelly of Irish public life.

The roll call is familiar – the money lending documentary that saw RTE investigated by a Tribunal of Inquiry, the threat of imprisonment that hung over Susan O’Keefe for exposing the corruption within the beef industry, RTE’s mammoth battles with NIB and Beverly Flynn that saw the station’s stories vindicated but left it out of pocket, the Government’s success in stifling the proposed Centre for Public Enquiry in 2005 – the list is endless.

All media organisations need to at least break even and the cost of investigative journalism is prohibitively expensive. Why bother investing resources when all you’re going to end up with is flak from powerful institutions and a bill to pay even if the story is proven to be true? As usual, journalism is left to pick up the pieces.

While The Irish Times is stuck with a €600,000 bill, Ahern explained how the ‘dig out’ from his business friends was actually a loan that had to be repaid (‘dig outs’ had tax implications), and how lady luck was always on his side when he bet on horses.

While The Irish Times will have less resource for investigative journalism, Ahern is to take up a professorship at NUI Maynooth: a handy way to bide his time until the Aras becomes vacant.