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A libel case against the Guardian brought by two Irish fishers accused of exploiting undocumented foreign workers as cheap labour on their trawler has been settled at the 11th hour by agreement of the parties.
Lenny Hyde and Pat O’Mahony, the Cork-based owners of the Labardie Fisher vessel, sued the Guardian for libel after it published allegations made by one of their Filipino deckhands about his working conditions in 2015.
The migrant worker, Demie Omol, had alleged that Hyde and O’Mahony, together with a Manila recruitment agency, had brought him across the border with Northern Ireland into the Republic to work in exploitative conditions. They had always vehemently denied the claims and stated they were unaware of the full circumstances of Omol’s recruitment.
Reporting these allegations was part of a wider investigation by the Guardian into the use of undocumented African and Asian migrants in the Irish fishing sector.
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Following the Guardian’s investigation, the Irish government formed an interdepartmental taskforce to tackle the problems, which were described at the time by some as “an open secret” in the industry. As a result of the Guardian’s work, the government later introduced a new permit scheme to regularise the legal position of hundreds of migrant fishers.
Hyde and O’Mahony’s libel case against the Guardian has been ongoing for almost seven years, and a jury trial of the case was due to open in the high court in Dublin on 8 November. But following discussions, the parties agreed to settle the claim. The Guardian has not paid any damages or costs, but it has agreed to pay a “lodgement” of €50,000 to the plaintiffs to settle their action, with no admissions of liability being made. Hyde and O’Mahony did not accept the lodgement when it was first offered in 2016, and the money has been held by the high court since.
A Guardian News and Media (GNM) spokesperson said: “We have vigorously defended our journalism since publication in 2015, and were prepared to go to court to defend it further. Reporting on the conditions in which labour exploitation can take hold is a matter of the highest public interest.
“The investigation remains online, in full, and entirely as originally published, without amendment or correction.”
