February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The writ has been issued in the Northern courts and McDowell is expected shortly to announce his legal counsel to fight the case in Belfast. It’s thought to be the first time any Irish minister for justice has been sued in this way.
Lawyers for Daily Ireland are expected to argue in the case, due before the courts this autumn, that McDowell was seeking to strangle at birth what it contends is the only republican daily newspaper in the country.
The newspaper’s managing director, Mairtin O Muilleoir, said that McDowell’s comments had “gone beyond the norms of political criticism.”
The Nazi slur, he said, despite complaints, continued to be published on the official Irish government website.
“This is at the very time that the Irish government is trying to assure nationalists it will protect them and their rights under the Good Friday Agreement,” he said.
O Muilleoir, who has worked for Daily Ireland’s sister publication, the Andersonstown News, for all but ten of its 33 years, said it had never been subject to a similar criticism, even by the most extreme unionist.
Daily Ireland, which began publication in February, recently announced circulation figures of over 10,000 daily — far more than its detractors had anticipated and indicative of its long-term commercial potential.
Unashamedly supporting a united Ireland, and taking a strongly nationalist editorial line, McDowell had compared it to a Nazi propaganda sheet even before the first issue was published.
His comments sparked a furious response from the newspaper’s management and from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which said the comments could pose a risk to the lives of the paper’s reporters.
McDowell, in the course of a trenchant attack on Sinn Fein and the IRA’s alleged involvement in the December 20th Belfast bank heist, had said “Small wonder that the Provisionals are now backing a new daily newspaper heavily featured in last week’s An Phoblacht.”
“Will it be to Irish democracy what the Volkischer Beobachter was to pre-WWII German democracy?”
The comments were carried in the Department of Justice official website.
Responding at the time, O Muilleoir said he had written seeking a meeting with McDowell “in regard to his scurrilous and dangerous comments.” He did not receive a reply to his letter and no meeting ever took place.
O Muilleoir had pointed out the paper had received a letter of goodwill from the taoiseach and that its accounts are audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“We stand on our record of community service and of consummate probity in all our business affairs,” he said.
One third of the paper’s total investment, he said, had come from prominent people in Irish/America and without their support and business acumen it would not have got off the ground.
He and others at the newspaper have received a series of loyalist death threats, including bullets through the post. All were raised by the NUJ with the British Government and reported to the police. No arrests or charges were ever made.
McDowell’s statement, said O Muilleoir, “increased the risk to our staff as they go about their work”.
That theme was taken up by the Irish Secretary of the NUJ, Seamus Dooley, who said the criticism was over the top and beyond that expected in the normal cut and thrust of politics.
Journalists in any democracy, he said, must report all points of view and it was egregious for the minister to seek to link writers with the views of those they reported on.