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On 27 January 2015, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland published its revised code of programme standards. The previous code had been in effect since 2007 (see IRIS 2008-5/23) and in 2014 a public consultation was launched in order to update the code. The Authority noted that the review indicated that the content of the previous code remained relevant, but “the structure and wording of the code required substantial revision”. This was to ensure the code was more “user-friendly and understandable”. Thus, while the previous code had over 14 sections under both “Content Rules” and “Content Principles”,...

The compliance committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland has held that the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ did not violate the broadcasting code’s rules on fairness and impartiality during a discussion on same-sex marriage. The decision arose following a complaint made over a June edition of RTÉ’s “The Marian Finucane Show”, a two-hour radio programme (for a similar complaint recently upheld against RTÉ, see IRIS 2014-8/27). The show’s format includes the presenter and guests reviewing the main events and newspaper stories of the week. During the programme, one guest highlighted newspaper...

The recently enacted Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2014, which significantly reforms the law on media mergers in Ireland, provides that the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources may publish certain guidelines on the operation of the Act. In particular, section 74 (inserting a new section 28L) tasks the minister with defining some important terms contained in the 2014 Act. The minister has now published a draft version of these guidelines, a 27-page document entitled “Guidelines on Media Mergers”, for public consultation. Under the 2014 Act, all proposed media mergers...

In 2008, a government-appointed advisory group published its 126-page report on media mergers, recommending a number of amendments to the law on media mergers contained in the Competition Act 2002 (see IRIS 2009-3/13). The Irish parliament enacted on the 28 July 2014 the Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2014, which entered into force on the 31 October 2014, amending the Competition Act 2002 and incorporating many of the media merger law reforms proposed by the advisory group. The 2014 Act repeals the old section 23 of the 2002 Act, which regulated media mergers and replaces it with a more...

Following its 12-month passage through parliament, the new Freedom of Information Act 2014 came into force in Ireland on 14 October 2014. The 91-page law repeals both the original Freedom of Information Act 1997 (see IRIS 1997-10/13) and the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Act 2003 (see IRIS 2003-9/28). Moreover, the Irish public expenditure minister has made a ministerial order under the 2014 Act, setting out the new fees that will be charged for freedom of information requests from October 2014 onwards. The most significant reform brought about by the 2014 Act is that, instead of listing specific...