Alison Morris

all the fallout that came from that.

And so there's so many legal considerations.

I don't think I've ever covered a court case that has been so heavily legal.

Every word is poured over before it goes into print.

And that's because the Attorney General in Northern Ireland, she has issued several warnings because social media is a curse.

When it comes to things like this, you have to remember there's two female complainants in this case.

They have lifelong anonymity.

The only person can take their anonymity away is them.

They have to waive it themselves and they have not done that.

And so we have to be very mindful of that throughout this case.

So it's not a straightforward case of reporting as you would in any other case.

And that's not because...

it's Jeffrey Donaldson purely it's because there's obviously we have the anonymity factor and then the fact that this is so heavily discussed on social media so you will notice that any of the articles that are printed either with yourselves or in the Belfast Telegraph where I work all the comments have to be closed off and people get angry at that because they think they have the right to discuss these things if they're ongoing but there's a very serious legal reason why that's happening.

Yeah, so we did have the Gillen Review, which looked quite extensively at what way sex abuse and violent sexual crimes and all of that was reported in Northern Ireland.

And that came around after the rugby trial, or the Belfast trial, as we all know, the Polly Jackson trial.

And there was...

such discussion on social media around that and the entire legal system I think came under scrutiny.

So John Gillan, a retired judge, he did the Gillan Review and he looked at that and he looked at the situation in the South where in the South a defendant, an accused,

isn't named until after the trial and then they're only named if they're found guilty he considered imposing that because there was an outcry for that because Polly Jackson and Stuart Olin were found not guilty but yet their names were all over the paper therefore there's a lot of discussion around should we name people prior to them being convicted or not

Gillan chose to keep the fact that we could name someone while they're facing charges.