A woman and the Irish Examiner

A letter was published in the Irish Examiner on 27 November 2014 under the heading “Solicitors’ tribunal only censured solicitor for failing to write a letter”.  The letter was signed by Senator Colm Burke of Colm Burke and Company Solicitors and referred to a report published in the previous day’s Irish Examiner on the findings of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal which had found the firm “guilty of misconduct in his practice”. 

The complainant believed that the heading of the letter “constituted a misleading statement and was distorted” and was neither “true nor accurate”.  The complainant claimed the publication of the letter constituted a breach of Principle 2 - Distinguishing Fact and Comment, Principle 3 – Fairness and Honesty, Principle 4 – Respect for Rights, Principle 5 – Privacy and Principle 7 – Court Reporting.

In preliminary communications between the complainant and the Irish Examiner before a formal process of conciliation under the auspices of the Press Ombudsman’s Office began the editor of the Irish Examiner offered to publish a letter from the complainant.  The offer of the publication of a letter was not acceptable to the complainant unless the letter could be published anonymously.  The editor would not agree to an anonymous letter being published. In further communications he acknowledged that the heading on the letter was incorrect and changed it on the Irish Examiner’s online edition.  He then offered to publish a correction. He proposed the following form of wording for the correction:

Correction

On November 27 last we published a letter headlined “Solicitors’ tribunal only censured solicitor for failing to write a letter”.  The headline was incorrect.  The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal censured solicitor Colm Burke on three separate, related grounds.  We are happy to correct the record.

The complainant was not satisfied with the wording of the proposed correction and suggested the following alternative wording for the correction:

Correction

On November 27 last we published a letter headlined “Solicitors’ tribunal only censured solicitor for failing to write a letter”.  The headline was incorrect.  The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal censured solicitor Colm Burke of Washington Street Cork for misconduct in his practice on three separate, related grounds.  We are happy to correct the record.

She also requested that the correction be published on the front page of the Irish Examiner and that it be published in the same text size and on the same day as the offending letter. She also asked that details of the three complaints against the solicitor, as set out in her Affidavit, be included in the correction.

The editor of the Irish Examiner agreed to include the solicitor’s address in the correction but would not agree to other inclusions requested by the complainant in her draft.  He offered to publish the correction “prominently, probably in the first four or five pages”.  He offered to publish the correction on the same day of the week as the letter under complaint had been published.

The complainant would not accept the editor’s offer unless the correction included information that the censure had been “for misconduct in his practice as a solicitor”.  The editor was not prepared to include that information as he claimed the correction referred to the error in the heading of the letter, not to the contents of the letter itself.

When the preliminary communications between the complainant and the newspaper failed to resolve the complaint a formal process of conciliation began. Neither party was prepared to substantially move from their original positions.  The editor argued that his proposed wording of a correction corrected the record and addressed the misleading heading to the letter.  The complainant was not satisfied with this and argued that the correction did not clarify the “misleading impression of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal’s findings of misconduct”.

As the formal conciliation process was unable to achieve an agreed outcome the complaint was referred to me for consideration. It is quite clear that the heading of the letter was misleading and did not reflect the findings of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.  The newspaper acknowledged this at an early stage in the conciliation process and offered to correct it.  The complainant clearly sought publication of more detail of the disciplinary findings than the editor believed was required in the correction of a misleading headline.

I can appreciate why the complainant might wish that information contained in the body of the letter of 27 November on the tribunal’s findings, which she regarded as misleading, might be rebutted in the correction.  However, I believe the newspaper’s proposed publication of a correction offered sufficient means of resolving the complaint about the inaccurate heading on the letter (which was the subject of the complainant’s original letter of complaint to the newspaper).  

 22 January 2015

The Complainant appealed against the decision to the Press Council of Ireland.