High Court directs Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams to hand over any documents about his alleged role in IRA Army Council to BBC in Denis Donaldson libel trial

The court has also dismissed a bid by Gerry Adams to strike out parts of the BBC’s defence against his libel action against the broadcaster over what he says is an allegation that he was involved in the murder of Denis Donaldson.

The court dismissed the BBC’s application for discovery of a second category of materials, he may have, relating to comments he allegedly made at a press conference in 1987 that the consequence of informing on the IRA is death.

At the High Court in Dublin on Friday, Ms Justice Emily Egan ruled that certain aspects of the BBC’s defence Mr Adams sought to have removed from the proceedings should go before the jury which hears his libel case against the BBC.

Mr Adams is suing the BBC for damages, claiming it falsely alleged that he sanctioned the killing of former Sinn Féin official Denis Donaldson in 2006.

The allegations were made in a 2016 BBC Spotlight programme and in a follow up report on the BBC website.

Mr Adams strongly denies that he had anything to do with Mr Donaldson’s death, while the BBC denies defamation.

In today’s judgement the court ordered Mr Adams to hand over any materials he might allegedly have in what it described as ‘Category 1’;-

a) The earliest document evidencing the plaintiff’s membership of the IRA and the latest document evidencing the plaintiff’s membership of the IRA, and;

b) The earliest document evidencing the plaintiff’s membership of the IRA army council and the latest document evidencing the plaintiff’s membership of the IRA army council.

Discovery was refused to the BBC on Category 2 documents. These were “All documents evidencing, recording or relating to the plaintiff’s knowledge of the treatment of informers or agents by the IRA and/or relating to the basis for his statement at a press conference in 1987 that ‘anyone else living in West Belfast knows that the consequence for informing is death’. “

The timeframe for documents in both categories 1 and 2 cover Mr Adam’s lifetime, the court document said.

On the attempt to remove part of the BBC’s legal defence, Mr Adams’s team told the court that both Spotlight and the BBC website story reported that the IRA denied any involvement in the murder of Mr Donaldson and that the Real IRA claimed responsibility in 2009.

However Mr Adam’s team said the article stated that intelligence received following the murder contradicted the IRA’s denial. They also said it did not inform the reader that an ongoing Garda investigation was focused on a separate individual, originally from County Donegal, but then based outside the State, who was described as “sympathetic to dissident republicanism”. Mr Adam’s team alleges that the failure to include this information is indicative of bad faith and cannot be fair and reasonable journalism.

His team also said that in July 2019 the BBC published on its website an article about an individual to be charged with the murder of Mr Donaldson, who was identified elsewhere as Anton Duffy, a Donegal man and dissident republican now serving a seventeen-year jail sentence in Scotland for plotting to murder the former UDA leader, Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair.

His team said that even at this late stage and in the light of the significant breakthrough in the Garda investigation, the defendant failed to remove the defamatory article from its website about Mr Adams, or correct it in any way in light of the new information.

After the broadcast the Adams team requested its immediate removal and an undertaking not to republish any of the material, which the BBC refused to do. His team said the article has continued to be published on the BBC website and has remained accessible online without qualification or amendment and that it does not alert the reader that it is the subject of a legal complaint, resulting in defamation proceedings.

Mr Adam’s team said the critical point is that the BBC admits publishing the comments but denies the meaning of them attributed by Mr Adams.

His team said the BBC does not stand over the truth of what Mr Adams contends is its central allegation: that he sanctioned and approved the murder of Mr. Donaldson.

Mr Adams contends that the news report should have been removed or at the very least corrected, but that it still remains in its original form on the internet.

Justice Egan ruled that the question was “a complex legal issue” which should be explored at a full trial.

“It will then be for the jury and not for this court to weigh the relevance of any legally relevant post-publication behaviour on the part of the defendant in its assessment of whether the publication was, and if relevant, remains, fair and reasonable,” she said in her ruling.

Read today’s court ruling in full here.

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