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The Compliance Committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) has held that the broadcaster FM 104 violated a number of broadcasting rules during a live phone-in programme which featured a discussion on the issue of “special needs children and their exclusion from summer camps.” A complaint had been made over a July 2016 broadcast on “The FM 104 Phone Show” that is broadcast each weekday night and covers a wide range of topics. The complainant claimed inter alia that the broadcasting comments by one caller who referred to an autistic child as “having no mind of their own; not being ‘all...

The Executive Complaints Forum of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) has rejected a complaint against the broadcaster TV3 that a comedian’s comment about the “Eucharist” infringed general community standards and respect for persons and groups in society. A complaint had been made over the March 2016 broadcast of the comedian Tommy Tiernan’s Crooked Man programme by TV3, in which he referred to the “Eucharist” as “that f****** thing”. Under section 48 of the Broadcasting Act 2009, individuals may make a complaint to the Authority that a broadcaster failed to comply with the broadcasting...

The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) has upheld a complaint regarding a television advertisement co-ordinated by the Irish Wind Energy Association (IWEA) as being in breach of Section 41(3) of the Broadcasting Act 2009, which provides that “a broadcaster shall not broadcast an advertisement which is directed towards a political end” (see IRIS 2009-10/18). A similar ban in the UK was found to be consistent with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights by the European Court of Human Rights in 2013 (see IRIS 2013-6/1). The complaint concerned an advertising campaign entitled “The...

On 16 September 2016, the Compliance Committee of the Broadcasting Authority Ireland (BAI) rejected by a majority two complaints concerning comments made in a live interview about a political party and some of its voters. The complaints concerned an edition of RTÉ’s long-running chat show The Late Late Show, broadcast on 19 February 2016, one week before the Irish parliamentary elections. The show included an interview with a well-known journalist, Paul Williams, on the subject of crime in Dublin, with most of the interview concerning two feuding crime families. However, toward the end of the interview,...

The High Court has ruled on the liability of internet intermediaries for defamatory posts by third parties on their platforms in the case of Muwema v Facebook Ireland Ltd. The plaintiff, Fred Muwema, a Ugandan lawyer, took issue with three allegedly “highly offensive and defamatory publications” posted on a Facebook page in March 2016. The publications were posted by a person identified only by the pseudonym ‘Tom Voltaire Okwalinga’ (“TVO”). Justice Donald Binchy in the High Court granted the order for disclosure of the identity and location of the person(s) operating the impugned page. However,...