Coco’s Law and Online Harassment

Coco’s Law is the name most people use for the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020, which commenced on 10 February 2021 and made three kinds of online harassment criminal offences: sharing an intimate image with intent to cause harm, sharing one without that intent, and sending threatening or grossly offensive messages. It sits beside the older offence of harassment under section 10 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997. What it does not do is give the person on the receiving end a civil claim. This guide covers what each offence requires, how to report to the Gardaí and what to bring, where Hotline.ie and the platform report fit, and how the civil claim for defamation or privacy runs alongside the criminal complaint rather than instead of it.

1. The Three Offences in Coco’s Law

The 2020 Act creates three offences, each with its own section and its own elements.

• Section 2: distributing or publishing an intimate image of a person without their consent, with intent to cause harm. This is the offence for the former partner who shares images to punish, and intent is what separates it from section 3.
• Section 3: distributing or publishing an intimate image without consent where there was no such intent. The person who forwards an image for a laugh commits this offence; the absence of intent is not a defence, it only changes the section.
• Section 4: sending a threatening or grossly offensive message. This covers the threat in a direct message, the abusive comment campaign and the post designed to intimidate, whether or not an image is involved.

None of the three requires the material to be false. A real image shared without consent is an offence under section 2 or 3; a threatening message is an offence under section 4 whether or not anything it says about you is true. That is the first difference from defamation.

2. Harassment Under the 1997 Act

Harassment was an offence before 2020 and remains one: section 10 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997 covers persistently following, watching, pestering, besetting or communicating with a person, where that seriously interferes with their peace and privacy or causes alarm, distress or harm. The word that does the work is persistently. A single threatening message is section 4 of the 2020 Act; a pattern of messages, tags, fake accounts, comments under every post and contact with your family or employer is section 10, and the two are often reported together. The evidence for section 10 is the pattern, so the dated sequence of contacts matters more than the worst single message.

3. Reporting to the Gardaí: What to Bring

Both Acts are enforced by the Gardaí and prosecuted by the State. You make a complaint, the Gardaí investigate, and if a prosecution follows you are a witness in it, not a party. Ring the station first and ask how they want the material. Bring screenshots of every message, post, image or comment with the URL, date and time visible, and the full thread rather than selected lines, because context shows intent under section 2 and persistence under section 10. Bring the account handle, display name and profile URL, and any other accounts you believe are the same person. Bring a dated timeline of every contact with a note of who else saw each item, your own replies unedited, a note of any earlier relationship or dispute, and the reference number of any platform or Hotline.ie report already made. Do not delete anything, do not reply further, and do not ask friends to confront the person. What the Garda route does not do is remove the content, declare it false or compensate you. Those outcomes come from the civil claim, which is why the two run alongside each other.

4. Hotline.ie and the Platform Report

Two removal routes run in parallel with the complaint. A victim of intimate image abuse may report to Hotline.ie for removal, as soon as the image is found. Separately, report the content to the platform it sits on. Since 17 February 2024 the Digital Services Act has required platforms to run notice-and-action systems, and Coimisiún na Meán, as Ireland’s Digital Services Coordinator, enforces the Online Safety Code for video-sharing platforms. Report the post, cite harassment or the intimate image, and keep the reference number; the route for each platform is in defamed on Instagram, TikTok or X. Take your own screenshots before reporting, because content removed on foot of a report is gone from your evidence too, and a platform report does not pause the one-year limitation period for a defamation claim.

5. The Civil Claim That Runs Alongside

The criminal complaint protects the public; the civil claim protects you, and it is built from what the content does. Where it states something false about you as fact, to at least one person other than you, and identifies you, it is defamation under section 6 of the Defamation Act 2009, actionable without proof of financial loss. Since 1 March 2026 the Circuit Court can grant a declaratory order under section 28 that the statement was false and defamatory, on a summary application and without damages, a correction order under section 30, a prohibition order under section 33 where the statement is defamatory and the defendant has no defence reasonably likely to succeed, and damages under section 31. Where the author is anonymous, section 45 lets the Circuit Court order the platform or host to disclose identifying information, and because Meta, Google, TikTok and X run their European operations from Dublin, the order lands on a Dublin-registered intermediary. Where what was published is private rather than false, images or details that were never anyone else’s to publish, the claim is for breach of privacy, whether or not the material is true. The full range is on our page on online harassment, abuse and privacy, and the Defamation Claim Checker walks through the section 6 elements first.

6. Where the Offence and the Civil Claim Overlap

The two systems ask different questions, and the same material can be inside one and outside the other.

• A true intimate image is not defamatory, because truth is a defence under section 16, but it is an offence under section 2 or section 3 and the subject of a privacy claim.
• A threat sent only to you is not published for the purposes of defamation, which requires publication to at least one person other than you, but it is an offence under section 4 and evidence for section 10.
• A false allegation posted to a group is defamation, and if it is grossly offensive or threatening it is also an offence under section 4; if it is one of a series, it is also harassment under section 10.

A Garda complaint does not get search results delisted either. A right to erasure request under GDPR Article 17 can seek delisting, but the Data Protection Commission has treated delisting on defamation grounds as difficult without a court finding, so the practical sequence is a section 28 declaratory order first and the delisting request second, explained in right to be forgotten: getting Google to delist.

7. The One-Year Clock and the Order of Steps

Section 38 gives one year from the date of first publication, extendable by the court to a maximum of two years only where the interests of justice require it, which the courts apply strictly, and section 11 gives one cause of action for all publications of the same statement, so the content staying online does not restart time. Nothing in the criminal process suspends that year. The period is suspended only while a specified ADR procedure, a Press Council complaint or a right of reply under the Broadcasting Act, is running, and neither applies to an individual harasser, though section 34K still requires your solicitor to inform you of those options and file a statutory declaration with the originating document. A Garda investigation can take longer than a year, so waiting for it to finish can cost you the civil claim. The sequence that keeps everything open is: capture the evidence; report to the platform and, for an intimate image, to Hotline.ie; make the Garda complaint; send the solicitor’s letter seeking removal and an apology, quoted as a fixed sum after the consultation; apply under section 45 if the author is anonymous; and issue inside the year. Court proceedings carry a risk of being ordered to pay the other side’s costs if the claim fails. The initial consultation is €400 plus VAT, payable in advance; work after it is quoted in writing under section 150 of the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015 before it starts.

8. If You Are the One Accused

People who receive a solicitor’s letter, or a call from the Gardaí, over messages they sent get the same analysis from the other side: whether the message went to anyone other than the complainant, whether it stated fact or opinion, whether truth under section 16 or honest opinion under section 20 answers it, and whether an apology under section 24, which is not an admission of liability, or an offer of amends under sections 22 and 23 closes the civil side. We never act for both sides of the same dispute.