Editorial: Memo to Sinn Fein - given your views and your history, you might have to stomach some criticism

​Last year an important defamation case in Northern Ireland came to an end.

​Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Fein leader, had taken a libel action against a DUP councillor, who said she would be “put back in her kennel”.

A woman who not merely scolds everyone that she is already the prime minister of Northern Ireland, but praises herself indeed as a generous such leader “for all”, took a case that should not have reached a court, given the cost to the public purse that hearings entail.

Yet the master who found that Ms O’Neill had not been libelled, as was obvious, instead of ordering her to pay all costs got the DUP councillor to pay his own. The master said that if the bill exceeded his savings, he could lose his house. What an utterly disproportionate prospect for a stupid remark, because a thin-skinned political leader could not ignore such unpleasant remarks from a lowly political rival.

A decade ago activists like the late lawyer Brian Garrett and Ulster Unionist Mike Nesbitt MLA tried to overhaul defamation law in Northern Ireland, as it had been in Great Britain, Sinn Fein and the DUP opposed urgently needed change in NI, a place so litigious that one unkind restaurant review in the Irish News was judged libellous.

Even now that libel law has been reformed, the new law in NI does not require someone to have suffered “serious harm,” as in GB.

Some of the most egregious libel cases have been taken by republicans. Now Gerry Kelly, ex IRA, has had his bid to sue over references to the shooting of a prison officer, for which he was not convicted but about which he boasted, thrown out. The judge called it a scandalous abuse of process. We congratulate the writer, Dr Malachi O’Doherty, a brave critic of republicans, for his victory.

Will republicans get the memo? If you defend past IRA terror or were yourself involved, you might have to stomach the odd criticism.