Another courts award for Carol

Clare Champion journalist Carol Byrne has scooped another national award for her courts’ coverage.

 

At the Justice Media Awards, hosted by The Law Society of Ireland, Carol received a merit award for her reporting of a child cruelty case heard at Ennis Circuit Criminal Court, which shocked Clare and received national publicity.

This is the fourth time Carol has been the recipient of a Justice Media Award, having received merit awards in 2008 and 2012, and an overall justice media award for court reporting in 2011. Her entry was selected in the court-reporting category of the competition, which is open to entries from across all national print media.

This year saw the highest number of entries to the competition, which has been run annually for the past 21 years at Black Hall Place in Dublin.

In their commendation, The Law Society judges said, “This excellently written article centred on the undue leniency of a judgment in a harrowing case of child cruelty that was heard at a sitting of Ennis Circuit Criminal Court. The shocking details revealed that eight children, ranging in age from infancy to their teens, had been deprived by their parents of food and clothing. They were beaten and uncared for during a nine-year period between 2001 and 2010. Incredibly, their mother walked free, despite pleas by her 17-year-old daughter for her to be jailed.”

They commented that the entry was “an excellent example of public-service journalism”.

“It reveals that the eldest daughter subsequently engaged a solicitor (Patrick Moylan) to plead with the DPP to review the case with a view to appealing it on the grounds of undue leniency. It pointed out that the nub of the appeal focused on the fact that the State should have made the sentencing judge aware that the accused had been before the courts previously,” they stated.

Clare Champion editor, Austin Hobbs, said Carol’s latest award is well deserved. “Courts are a very difficult aspect of a journalist’s work but Carol has mastered it well and has a keen interest in the judicial system.

“Any member of the public can sit in a courtroom and listen to proceedings, although there are some ‘in camera’. In practice, however, outside of high-profile cases, very few members of the public do attend courts.

“The public relies on the media to bring the judicial process into the public domain and The Clare Champion fulfils this role,” he concluded.