Over the last couple of years I have written several items on this blog about the worrying lack of plurality in the Irish media market.

I have pointed in particular to the fact that a billionaire businessman, Denis O’Brien, owns far too wide a range of media outlets. And I have argued that such a concentration of ownership poses potential threats to Ireland’s democracy.

Now comes a report by four lawyers at two UK-based legal firms which raises similar concerns and calls on the Irish government to intervene.

In the report, “on the concentration of media ownership in Ireland”, the authors state: “we consider there to be a perfect storm which poses grave risks to freedom of expression and media pluralism in the Irish market”.

That storm is composed of O’Brien’s reach through newspapers and radio holdings in company with his penchant for issuing writs against rival media outfits.

To recap, O’Brien is the largest shareholder in Independent News & Media (INM), which publishes Ireland’s two best-selling newspapers, plus the Sunday World and Dublin Herald.

It also owns the Belfast Telegraph, 50% of the Irish Daily Star and 13 paid-for regional weeklies (with seven more soon to be acquired).



According to the INM website, it manages gross assets of €187.6m and is the largest newspaper contract printer and wholesale newspaper distributor on the island of Ireland.

Then comes radio. O’Brien is chairman and principal shareholder of Communicorp, which owns Ireland’s two leading commercial radio talk stations, Newstalk and Today FM. In addition, it owns Dublin’s 98FM, SPIN 1038, TXFM (soon to close) and SPIN South West.

However, the state’s public service broadcaster, RTÉ, is dominant in radio (and TV). It has been calculated, in an October 2015 study, that Communicorp has a 20% share of the Irish radio market. The company, citing “industry standard methodology”, has challenged this, arguing that it is 16%.

Whatever the case, INM’s newspaper dominance in addition to Communicorp’s radio assets anchors O’Brien as the country’s major private media mogul.

But there is another aspect to O’Brien’s activities that exercises the new report’s authors: Caoilfhionn Gallagher and Jonathan Price of London’s Doughty Street Chambers, and Gavin Booth and Darragh Mackin of KRW Law in Belfast.

Arguing that Ireland has “one of the most concentrated media markets of any democracy”, they contend that this “alarming” feature has to be viewed alongside another “gravely concerning aspect of the Irish media landscape”.

This is the “sustained and regular threats of legal action by Mr O’Brien to media organisations and journalists who are engaged in newsgathering or reporting about his activities.”

And this has to be seen in the light of what the authors call the “chilling effect” of Ireland’s current defamation laws. They argue: “This is a toxic combination for freedom of expression and media plurality”.

They believe it “imperative that urgent action is taken” and dismiss “suggestions that this is a constitutional no-go area, or an European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) no-go area”.

But they concede that retroactive action to break up media holdings “is a difficult area... affecting property rights and impacting upon an existing market”.

So they call for a “detailed multi-disciplinary analysis” to consider “complex and nuanced issues... including how precisely to measure plurality”.

To that end, they conclude: “We recommend that the government establish a cross-disciplinary commission of inquiry” in order to examine the issues “and make concrete recommendations, within a tight time frame”.

The authors were commissioned to compile a legal opinion by the Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan on behalf of the European parliament’s left-wing grouping GUE/NGL.

Boylan presented the study to the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom in Leipzig on 6 October. She will launch it in Ireland next Monday (24 October), at the Cliff Town House on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 2.30-4pm.

NB: If you happened to be wondering who might be the third-largest media owner in Ireland (after O’Brien and RTÉ) it is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, with Sky plus the Irish editions of the Sun, Times and Sunday Times. It is currently acquiring the Wireless Group (formerly UTV Media) with holdings that include six Irish local radio stations (including FM104) and a Belfast outlet.