By Sabrina Sweeney
On any given month, the District Court sits in multiple Donegal towns, including Letterkenny, Buncrana, Dungloe, Glenties, Donegal Town and Ballyshannon.
These hearings deal with the everyday business of justice, and what happens inside the buildings matters because it affects people’s lives, rights and responsibilities, and shapes confidence in how the law is applied.
That’s why the Courts Reporting Scheme, managed by Coimisiún na Meán, is worth paying attention to. Its purpose is to fund “comprehensive, professional, and publicly accessible reports of court proceedings” at local and regional level, with a focus on the District and Circuit Courts.
The Donegal News is currently seeking a court reporter on a one-year contract, funded through the scheme, to cover courts across the county. It’s a practical example of how a national initiative can translate into more reporting capacity at local level.
The timing is not accidental. Over the past two decades, newsrooms have changed dramatically. When I started out as a reporter with the Impartial Reporter, the paper had a dedicated court reporter. He knew the courthouse routine inside out, had a strong sense of what was in the public interest, and never seemed thrown by a long list or a sudden legal complication, of which there were often many.
When he wasn’t in court, he was at his desk, typing at speed, turning shorthand into clean copy.
The public benefited because there was consistency: someone was there, regularly, recording what happened.
Nowadays, most organisations don’t have the staffing levels for that. Court reporting can mean long days in a courtroom followed by longer evenings writing up accurately, checking names, confirming outcomes, and ensuring legal constraints are respected.
In newsrooms with smaller teams, particularly local newspapers, the pressure is to prioritise what can be gathered quickly, updated continuously, and produced with minimal time away from the desk.
Courts do still get covered, but it’s often more ad hoc. That matters because court reporting does a specific job. It explains decisions that might otherwise be misunderstood.
It draws a clear line between allegation and proof. It records the reasons behind bail, sentencing and court orders. It provides a public account of cases involving public services and public resources.
It also builds a clearer picture of recurring issues, such as addiction, domestic violence, road safety, repeat offending, and the points where services are not keeping pace.
Charlie Moloney, who has worked with the National Council for the Training of Journalists, is blunt about what’s at stake. When fewer reporters are in court, the day-to-day cases go uncovered and even serious trials can pass with only patchy reporting.
His view is that good court journalism costs money, and as news organisations cut costs, the courts become less visible to the public.
That’s a loss for democracy, because if nobody is there extracting information, checking what’s being said, and reporting it accurately, the system operates with less scrutiny.
There’s a practical consequence, too: when reporters aren’t present, there’s less challenge to reporting restrictions, and it becomes easier for limits on open justice to become the default.
There is, of course, a concern some people raise: if court reporting is supported through a state-funded scheme, does that undermine independence? Does it create a pressure to soften coverage or “toe the line”?
I don’t think that follows. The first requirement is transparency: if a role is supported by a public scheme, readers should be told.
The second is to be clear about what the work is. Court reporting is not a government message; it is reporting on proceedings that regularly include uncomfortable facts and, at times, criticism of State bodies and agencies.
In the first round of the court-reporting and local-democracy schemes, more than 100 new journalism roles were created, with funding from Coimisiún na Meán totalling more than €6 million. Those numbers are important, but the principle behind them matters more.
A functioning democratic society needs court reporters. And a properly funded chance to be one, even for a year, is a strong opportunity for any journalist who wants to cut their teeth at the heart of reporting, where accuracy and editorial judgement are required every day.
