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DUBLIN — The Irish Times newspaper won a long-running legal battle Friday to protect the identity of a key source who provided documents showing that former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern was under investigation for corruption.
Irish Times editor Geraldine Kennedy lauded the Supreme Court appeal verdict as "a very good judgment for investigative journalism."
"For the first time the right of journalists to protect their sources is enshrined in Irish law," said Kennedy, who along with reporter Colm Keena had faced potential imprisonment if they didn't reveal the source.
Keena and Kennedy had refused to comply with an October 2007 High Court judgment ordering them to identify their source for the confidential documents from a fact-finding tribunal into political corruption.
The Irish Times used those documents to report in September 2006 that the then-prime minister was under investigation for surreptitiously receiving euro50,000 to euro100,000 ($70,000 to $140,000) from businessmen in the early 1990s, when he was finance minister.
Ahern initially claimed all the money involved unrepaid "loans" from close friends, but kept changing his explanations as new secret payments involving other businessmen, groups and events came to light.
The tribunal ultimately uncovered evidence of much larger secret payments — including from businessmen in both England and Ireland whom Ahern said he couldn't identify — over a longer period when Ahern kept no bank accounts and operated exclusively from cash kept in personal safes. The scandal spurred Ahern to resign in May 2008 after 11 years in power.
The tribunal chairman, Justice Alan Mahon, said the Irish Times report undermined the investigation's public credibility, because of suspicions that tribunal staff were behind the leak. Mahon called on the Irish Times to reveal its source as someone outside the tribunal's control.
When Kennedy refused and declared that her paper had destroyed the leaked documents, Mahon sued Kennedy and the report's author, Keena, for contempt of court.
The three-judge High Court had ruled in Mahon's favor, describing the Irish Times' decision to destroy documents rather than hand them over to Mahon as "reprehensible conduct" and "an astounding and flagrant disregard of the rule of law."
But the five-judge verdict of the Supreme Court, delivered Friday following their hearing of the appeal in December, found that the High Court had placed too much emphasis on the destruction of documents.
Supreme Court Justice Nial Fennelly, writing the unanimous judgment from Ireland's highest court, ruled that the High Court had failed to identify a logical link between the newspaper's destruction of documents and the real issue at hand — whether Irish law required them to reveal the source at all.
In this case, Fennelly wrote, Mahon and the High Court had failed to demonstrate "any clear benefit" to unveiling the source. By contrast, there was an obvious public interest served by the Irish Times report.
Fennelly said the High Court judgment was imbalanced because it "devalued the journalistic privilege so severely" in favor of judicial interests.
Keena said he was delighted "that the justices recognized the importance of the story and recognized that we were acting in the public interest."
