A former Kildare Gaelic footballer has been awarded €310,000 damages after a High Court judge found he was "grossly defamed" by articles about his personal life.
Former Kildare footballer Brian Nolan had taken legal action against the Sunday World newspaper.
Mr Justice Tony O’Connor ruled the articles published in 2012 and 2013 amounted to a "very serious"libel and had a serious impact on the former footballer.
The judge ruled that on a scale of one to 100, the defamation ranked at 75.
He awarded €250,000 compensatory damages and €30,000 aggravated damages and a further €30,000 punitive damages.
Rejecting defence arguments the articles were in the public interest, he stressed the court's duty to vindicate the rights of citizens "will not be thwarted by the vacuous plea that there is a public interest in publishing salacious material without regard to the truth".
However, he dismissed additional claims by Mr Nolan concerning breach of his right to privacy arising from circulation of photos of him taken while he was attending adult parties, which included him beside scantily clad women.
Mr Nolan consented to the taking of photos by a stranger who attended the party and photos were freely available among up to 26 people of which he might have known only four at most. For those reasons, the right to privacy was not breached the judge ruled.
Mr Nolan (49), who played senior football for Kildare in the 1990s, represented by Jim O’Callaghan SC and Paul O’Higgins SC, who told the court he was shunned by his extended family and within his social and sporting circles following the articles.
