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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,...

On 30 August 2016, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) launched its Media Research Funding Scheme 2016, with funding being made available for research projects on themes of relevance to the broadcasting sector and the BAI. The Scheme is set out in a 19-page document, which identifies a number of areas of interest: first, gender in the media, including identifying the research gaps in gender in radio and television in Ireland; identifying gender performance indicators or broadcasters; and other relevant gender topics. Second, broadcast media and society, including the extent to which the...

On 4 August 2016, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) published its updated Access Rules, which set out the rules on providing subtitling, captioning, Irish sign language and audio description for broadcasters in Ireland (for the previous rules, see IRIS 2015-3/18). In particular, the rules include targets for three new public service broadcasters, namely Oireachtas TV, UTV Ireland and Irish TV (see IRIS 2015-4/14 and IRIS 2016-8/14). Under the rules, a range of percentage targets are set for each new broadcaster that they must provide for the period 2016-2018. The target range is increased...

On 23 June 2016, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources signed an order designating recently established Irish TV as a television service “having the character of a public service” under section 130 of the Broadcasting Act 2009. The designation means that Irish TV will now be available on Saorview, the free-to-air digital terrestrial television service (see IRIS 2014-2/25). Irish TV is a local and international channel, which offers live and recorded programming relevant to Irish people in Ireland and abroad. It began broadcasting in May 2014 under a licence issued by the...