The High Court has quashed a decision imposing a five-year ban on Ning Liqun making further Irish visa applications, finding that the process was procedurally flawed. The court left in place the original refusal of her work visa and did not quash the separate decision revoking her work permit.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Micheál O’Higgins on 28 May 2025, concerns a judicial review of the August 2022 decision to uphold the proposed ban. The court said the only decisions properly challenged were that exclusion decision and the work permit revocation; the visa refusal itself was not before it.
The August decision cited concerns about salary payments in Ms Liqun’s current employment in China and the authenticity of Cloud Intersoft, her proposed Irish employer. It referred to concerns about the company’s website, headed paper and other submitted documents. The judge said those specific concerns had not appeared in the initial refusal letter or the notes of telephone interviews, and that the applicant had not been alerted to them before the final decision.
The respondent had not contacted Cloud Intersoft, and at the hearing could not identify which basic elements of the company’s website or headed paper were considered missing or questionable, or explain what checks had been carried out. The court said it could not assess the basis for the concerns. It also found that the applicant had not been told before the final decision about the specific allegation of salary-payment inconsistencies, and that the correspondence showed she believed the earlier reference to inconsistencies concerned Cloud Intersoft rather than her Chinese employer.
The judge considered the combined effect of these issues, the lack of information about criteria for imposing a ban or setting its length, and the serious consequences of a five-year exclusion. He said the unexplained concerns could have affected whether a ban was imposed and its duration. The court did not decide that the alleged concerns were false; it found the process leading to the exclusion decision unfair in the circumstances.
The court ordered certiorari quashing the 11 August 2022 decision affirming the five-year exclusion. It was not satisfied there was a basis to quash the second respondent’s decision revoking the work permit. The original visa refusal remains extant, and the court said it had not been properly challenged. It left remittal, final orders and costs for a further hearing.