GEMMA O’DOHERTY HAS lost an action to have a defamation case taken by a brother of murdered journalist Veronica Guerin struck out.

Ms Justice Siobhan Phelan also preliminarily said she would award costs against O’Doherty in the application. 

O’Doherty is being sued by Jimmy Guerin, who is an independent Fingal County Councillor.

Guerin has submitted that O’Doherty defamed him in social media posts and a website video, which, he claims, meant he was a convicted paedophile.

He sued O’Doherty, a former journalist with the Irish Independent, over the postings on Twitter (X), Facebook and her own internet video broadcast portal.

O’Doherty took made an application the have the case struck out claiming in the High Court that Guerin’s action was “malicious, vexatious, frivolous, based on fraud, perjury and deception”. She also claimed it was an attack on press freedom. 

Judge Phelan published her judgment this morning in which she said that it should be up to a jury to decide the case.

The Judge also said there is no evidence to support O’Doherty’s claim that the proceedings taken by Guerin are “abusive” and designed to silence her. 

“Bare assertions of this kind could never be enough to justify the exercise of a strike out power,” the judgment states. 

The judgment states also that the judge is “satisfied” that nothing in Guerin’s action “amounts to an abuse of the process of the court”.

The Judge in her ruling said that there was “no legal or factual basis” which entitled O’Doherty to have the defamation proceedings struck out. 

The broadcast includes a statement of “how the brother of Veronica Guerin” was found with large quantities of child sexual abuse images.

O’Doherty claims she was referring to Jimmy Guerin’s brother, Martin Guerin (73), who pleaded guilty in 2019 to possession of hundreds of images and 146 movie files of child pornography for which he received a two-and-a-half-year suspended prison sentence.