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The Information Commissioner has issued its decision on whether the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) is required under freedom of information law to release certain documents compiled during its investigation into a public broadcaster’s current-affairs programme. The Commissioner held that the BAI was justified in refusing access to interview notes with journalists and written submissions from the public broadcaster RTÉ. On 4 May 2012, the BAI published a determination on RTÉ’s television programme “Prime Time Investigates - A Mission to Prey”, which had included allegations that an Irish...

On 27 January 2015, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland published its new “Rules on Television Subtitling, Sign Language and Audio Description”. The previous rules had been in effect since 2012 (see IRIS 2012-7/28) and in 2014 a public consultation was launched on revising the rules (see IRIS 2014-7/25). The rules set out the level of subtitling, sign language and audio-description that television broadcasters must offer to the public. Under the new rules, a range of percentage targets are set for each broadcast service (television station) that they must provide for the period 2014-2018 and...

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...