There are a couple of Irish cases slotting privacy violations into negligence; I don’t think the reasoning is very well thought through and the cases are ones that would satisfy a more orthodox privacy violation claim (if there is such a thing)

Both case involved police leaking information about the claimants;

Hanahoe v Hussey [1998] 3 IR 69 (the existence of a duty was sort of conceded by the State in this case, so not a very strong authority); the brief note of the case in Byrne & Binchy’s Annual Review of Irish Law 1997 doesn’t get into the issue in any depth

Gray v Minister for Justice [2007] IEHC 52; [2007] 2 IR 654 (one of the plaintiffs also suffered recognised psychiatric harm in this case); similar short note in Byrne & Binchy; I did a brief critical comment in Koziol & Steininger (eds), European Tort Law 2007

I’m not against the idea of negligent, rather than intentional, violation being an actionable wrong in principle; my concern, like the point identified by Hilary is whether is constitutes an injury for the purposes of negligence (I think Donal Nolan had an article in the MLR around the time on the issue of what constitutes Damage for a negligence claim – may have a different take on the issue)

The defamation issue has come up in Ireland too – we don’t generally let negligence circumvent defamation, but if an independent claim (e.g. for pure economic loss) can be substantiated as a result of something said about a person’s character, then a claim in negligence may be permitted to proceed - Jeffrey v The Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence [2019] IESC 27 (I have a brief note on this in the Yearbook of European Tort Law 2019; Byrne & Binchy’s Annual Review also has a note on it)

Happy (or unhappy) hunting if you chose to delve into these,

 

 

 

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