Nottingham Forest owner sues Crystal Palace over ‘gun banner’
by: Adham Harker
August 13, 2026
The landscape of Irish media law has undergone a transformative shift with the commencement of the Defamation (Amendment) Act 2026 on 1 March 2026. Central to this reform is the introduction of a new “serious harm” threshold, similar to the test set out in section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013 in England and Wales.
Under the 2026 Act, ‘bodies corporate’ (i.e. profit-making companies) must now clear a significantly higher evidential barrier in order to bring a claim in defamation. A statement is no longer actionable simply because it is defamatory; it must be proven to have caused, or be likely to cause, serious harm to the entity’s reputation. In this context, harm is only classified as “serious” if it results in serious financial loss. An almost identical provision exists in s1(2) of the Defamation 2013, in which bodies trading for profit must also show serious financial loss.
However, Ireland has notably declined to impose a serious harm test for individuals (as set out in s1(1) of the Defamation Act 2013). Whilst that provision does not require individuals to show financial loss, they are required to evidence that the defamatory statement has caused serious harm to their reputation. In Ireland, however, the old common law standard remains: a statement is defamatory if it tends to injure their reputation in the eyes of reasonable members of society.
Concern has been raised by defendants and media organisations for some time that Ireland’s lower evidential threshold has led to unscrupulous claimants whose claims would not satisfy the more stringent legal test in England and Wales opting to bring claims in Ireland instead. Whilst this reform does go some way to realigning the imbalance between two closely connected jurisdictions, the absence of an analogous test for individual claims begs the question of whether the Irish government’s purported policy aim is satisfied.
Hermione Hill
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