PAST EVENT: Belfast Film Festival

APRIL 29 2010 – 2PM

MAKING POLITICAL FILMS ABOUT THE NORTH: THEN AND NOW

The troubles in the North of Ireland have long been the subject of film-makers. The film-making landscape has changed over the years, as has the political landscape. Both self censorship and political censorship have been key factors in defining which films get made and which don’t. The panel will discuss selected issues relating to censorship — what forms of censorship influence the work being made? is there any difference to the types of films being made 30 years ago and now?

The panel will include:

Mark Cousins director of The First Movie, screening at the Belfast Film Festival, has a first class degree in Film and Media Studies and Fine Art from the University of Stirling. He has since lectured on film history, been published internationally and made documentary films on arts and political themes. A former Director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, he now presents Scene-by-Scene on BBC television, conducting career interviews with actors and directors including Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Shohei Imamura, Jack Lemmon, Sean Connery, Tom Hanks, Dennis Hopper, Kirk Douglas, Rod Steiger, Jeanne Moreau, Lauren Bacall, the Coen Brothers, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Donald Sutherland, Ewan McGregor and Jayne Russell. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

James Flynn commenced his career in the Irish film industry with John Boorman’s Merlin Films International as Head of Development having previously worked for the Investment Bank of Ireland. After working as Business Manager of the fledgling Irish Film Board, he, along with Juanita Wilson, established Metropolitan Film Productions Limited with the intention of making strong, independent and resonant films for the international market. In-house projects developed and produced by Metropolitan Films include H3 and Nora.

He established Octagon Films in 2002. Octagon developed and produced Inside I’m Dancing, written by Jeffrey Caine (Goldeneye, The Constant Gardener) and directed by Damien O’Donnell (East Is East, Heartlands). Produced in conjunction with Working Title/Universal, it won the Audience Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and was released in the UK and Ireland by Momentum Pictures in autumn ‘04. It was screened as Rory O’Shea Was Here at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and subsequently released in the U.S. by Focus. He is currently jointly producing Neil Jordan’s Ondine, starring Colin Farrell, in West Cork this summer and this will be released internationally during the Summer and/or Autumn of 2009.

For more information please visit their website http://www.belfastfilmfestival.org

Trouble in the Blog O'Sphere

It all began innocently enough: just before Christmas, Sunday Times journalist John Burns wrote a piece lamenting the shortcomings of blogging in Ireland. Leading bloggers naturally begged to differ.

A month later, the spat was picked up by Trevor Butterworth writing on Forbes.com, who noted that “it’s hard to think of a free country more suited to blogging than Ireland”. By the same token, it’s at least as hard to think of a country more given to litigation; and the point was illustrated by a story retailed almost en passant in Butterworth’s piece:

As one journalist told me, Ireland’s media is currently abuzz over a “confidential” legal settlement against a blogger, who allegedly had to pay almost $140,000 in damages for a libelous post, seen by few, swiftly purged from the site, and readily apologized for.

This was intriguing. By the end of the week, John Burns in the Sunday Times had the
full story
:

A blogger has agreed a €100,000 settlement after libelling Niall Ó Donnchú, a senior civil servant, and his girlfriend Laura Barnes. It is the first time in Ireland that defamatory material on a blog has resulted in a pay-out. … In December 1, 2006, a blogger who styles himself as Ardmayle posted a comment about the couple … Following a legal complaint, he took down the blog and in February 2007 he posted an apology which had been supplied by Ó Donnchú’s and Barnes’ lawyer … However, the pair subsequently issued separate proceedings. It is understood that the €100,000 settlement was agreed shortly before the case was due before the High Court.

Indeed, there had been quite a detailed report at the time in the Sunday Independent; and in the last week, many blogs have pored over the story.

There’s nothing new in online defamation; the same basic legal principles apply online as they do offline; the medium may change, but the legal consequences of the message remain the same. But the story does raise some interesting legal issues. Mark Coughlan on TheStory.ie pointed out that, before the storm blew up this week, Ardmayle had been “little known, to say the least”, and he quite rightly queried the actual damage the blog had done to the plaintiff’s reputations. UCD law lecturer TJ McIntyre picked
up that point
:

The level of damages in defamation reflects the extent of publication — i.e. the extent to which the defamatory material was actually read. This is not (despite the best efforts of plaintiffs’ lawyers) the same as the extent to which it might have been read. Consequently (leaving aside other factors such as the gravity of the allegations) damages should be greatly reduced where the audience can be shown to be negligible. Potential readability worldwide notwithstanding.

For him, therefore, the case highlights the importance of keeping good server logs to counter the all-too-easy assumption that “availability online automatically equals a mass audience”.

Ireland’s libel laws have recently been overhauled by the Defamation Act, 2009, which came into force on 1 January this year. Section 31(4) provides that the court in a defamation action shall have regard to a range of factors in making an award of general damages, including:

(b) the means of publication of the defamatory statement including the enduring nature of those means,
(c) the extent to which the defamatory statement was circulated, … [and]
(f) the importance to the plaintiff of his or her reputation in the eyes of particular or all recipients of the defamatory statement …

These considerations tend to reinforce TJ’s point about the importance of keeping good server logs. It is hard to tell from the reports whether any of the Act’s defences might have been available to the blogger, though the new defence of fair and reasonable publication on a matter of public interest, whilst hobbled, may have done.

The Act is a welcome, but incomplete, reform — incomplete not least because it takes little account of the increasing trend towards online communication. In particular, it does not attempt to achieve inter-operability between its restatement of the traditional defence of innocent publication and the defence provided to intermediary service providers by the implementation of the E-Commerce Directive.

Finally, there are questions of the compatibility of this kind of outcome with the free speech provisions of the Irish Constitution and of the European Convention on Human Rights. There are, in particular, emerging arguments that various European Courts have clearly moved to grant traditional press freedoms not only to traditional media but also to online actors such as bloggers engaged in “the creation of forums for public debate”.

This might not have protected Ardmayle’s obscure blog, but if — contrary to the views John Burns expressed in the article at this beginning of this post — the Blog O’Sphere continues to develop as a vibrant forums for public debate, then future bloggers in Ardmayle’s shoes may be able to rely on the Constitution and the Convention. Until then, we will all have to tread softly.

Dr Eoin O’Dell is a Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Law in Trinity College Dublin; he blogs at Cearta

Birmingham six libel case settled

Barrister Louis Blom-Cooper has settled in a libel action brought against him by Birmingham six pair Hugh Callaghan and Gerry Hunter at the Dublin High Court. Hunter and Callaghan claimed that a 1997 pamphlet by Blom-Cooper, The Birmingham Six and Other Cases, had implied that they could be guilty of carryimg out the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, in which 21 people were killed.

Blom-Cooper has apologised for any “unintended suggestion” of guilt. Other elements of the settlement cannot be revealed.

Ireland has one of the most expensive libel jurisdictions in Europe.