UNITED KINGDOM/IRELAND
Legal Futures
Leading civil liberties practice Hodge Jones & Allen (HJA) has received a full apology and damages from The Times newspaper over an article which accused the firm of misleading victims of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.
The settlement came nearly a year since the original article was printed and with the London firm on the point of issuing a claim for libel.
The article – published under the headline “Law firms accused of misleading Magdalene victims” – reported an Irish government statement which suggested that HJA had falsely claimed in an advert to have drafted government proposals for a compensation scheme which was about to go live.
The advert aimed to inform the victims of the laundries of the scheme. The laundries, the last of which only closed in 1996, were run by religious orders; workers were held against their will and worked without pay to literally wash away their sins – usually the ‘sin’ of having a child outside wedlock.
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