Search results : 309

On 20 June 2006, new guidelines for the media on covering suicide were issued by the National Office of Suicide Prevention, which is part of the Health Service Executive. Drawn up by experts in the field and support groups such as the Samaritans and the Irish Association of Suicidology, the guidelines aim to promote responsible coverage of suicide and to reduce the risk of “copycat” deaths, estimated in Ireland as 6% of all suicides. The key provisions are designed to prevent glamorising or sensationalising suicide, to ensure, in the words of the Minister of State for Mental Health, “that public...

At the beginning of September 2006, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) launched the third and final phase of the consultation process in the development of a new code of programme standards, as provided for by section 19 of the Broadcasting Act 2001 (see IRIS 2001-4: 9). The draft code includes provision for audience information and guidance by issuing prior warnings for programme material which has the potential to offend, by using the watershed or by implementing an evaluative or descriptive classification system (s.2.2). There are special provisions for the protection of children,...

At the beginning of August 2006, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) launched the second phase of a two-phase consultation process in relation to its new general code on television advertising. The BCI is required by section 19 of the Broadcasting Act 2001 (see IRIS 2001-4: 9) to provide advertising and other codes. The current code of advertising dates from 1995 and was amended slightly in 1999 to give effect to certain changes contained in the Television without Frontiers Directive. Phase 2 of the consultation process involves commenting on the draft code. The draft code modernises the...

In 2005, the Government decided that in tandem with new defamation legislation it would bring in new privacy legislation. To that end a working group, consisting of a senior lawyer and three civil servants, was set up in July 2005 and reported in March 2006. Its terms of reference required it to consider Articles 8 and 10 ECHR and prepare proposals on a general tort of violation of privacy, and identification of specific offensive forms of invasion of privacy. The group concluded that the arguments in favour of the introduction of a clear statutory cause of action outweighed the arguments against...

Ireland’s current defamation law is largely common law (judge-made law), partly codified and updated in the Defamation Act 1961, which was modelled on the British Act of 1956. Successive Irish governments had promised to modernise defamation law and finally a new Bill has been published. The Bill follows many of the recommendations made by the Law Reform Commission in 1991 and reconsidered by a Legal Advisory Group established by the Minister for Justice in 2003. Some of the provisions are essentially tidying-up measures and clarifications of uncertainties that had developed. Others involve more...