The Press Ombudsman has decided not to uphold a complaint from a woman that Kerry’s Eye breached Principle 5 (Privacy) of the Code of Practice of the Press Council of Ireland through publication of information about her home.
In March 2025 Kerry’s Eye published an article reporting on statistics it took from the Residential Property Price Register. It described a number of homes that had recently been sold in Kerry, along with a report on trends in property sales and information on the prices for which the houses were sold.
A woman complained that the article included a photograph of her home, together with specific details which, she said, made it easily identifiable and compromised her privacy and safety. She said that publication of the article, particularly a large photograph of her house, with references to the interior, extended an invitation to criminals suggesting that because of its value, the contents of the home must also be of high value.
She said the sale of the house had been private and the photograph used by the publication came from an earlier attempt to sell it and were irrelevant to the current context. She said the publication had sensationalized a private transaction without consent. The woman complained that publication had breached Principle 5 of the Code of Practice, particularly in relation to its assertion that the “private and family life, home and correspondence of everyone must be respected”.
The editor responded that he did not accept that the information that was published compromised the security of the complainant. He said it was taken from a publicly available data source (the Residential Property Price Register) and that publication of the material complained about had been provided for through legislation and was in the public interest. He said the house was noteworthy because of the price that had been paid for it. He noted that the Register included more detail than Kerry’s Eye had published, including its exact location.
He said that the photograph was published previously in another (named) newspaper article relating to the property, that remains readily publicly accessible through a simple online search. He said that in circumstances where photographs are widely used for the purposes of sale, it was inconceivable that any privacy issues arise where such a photograph is used post-sale.
Decision
The Press Ombudsman sympathises with the complainant’s sense of a loss of privacy due to the publication in a newspaper of information about her family home. However, the Code of Practice states that the right to privacy should not prevent publication of matters of public record or in the public interest. The Press Ombudsman finds that the publication was entitled to assert that the information it published was already available to the public and that publication of information available on the Residential Property Price Register was in the public interest. She notes that the
Register provides specific information that would readily enable any interested party to locate any listed house. The Press Ombudsman finds that there is no breach of Principle 5 of the Code of Practice.
Information about certain interior details which was published during an earlier attempt to sell the house remains in the public domain. While there is no public interest justification for publishing such details again, the Press Ombudsman does not consider that this is in itself a matter of sufficient gravity to constitute a breach of privacy.
26 May 2025