The High Court has refused Catherine Sheehan’s application to set aside a judgment dismissing her proceedings against Cork County Council for inordinate and inexcusable delay.
In a supplemental judgment delivered on 7 June 2023, Mr Justice Garrett Simons said Sheehan had not established that the hearing of the council’s dismissal motion was unfair or involved a fundamental denial of justice. The court refused to reopen its principal judgment of 13 February 2023, which had dismissed the proceedings after a hearing on 30 January.
Sheehan initially said she had not been given all the documents relevant to the chronology before the January hearing. The judge said the council’s booklet of pleadings lodged in advance was incomplete, omitting its notice of motion and grounding affidavit. After noticing this, he obtained the High Court case file to read the complete motion papers before the hearing.
At the hearing, the council’s counsel supplied a core booklet containing the motion papers. The judge said the digital audio recording confirmed that Sheehan received a copy, and that she also handed in copies of exhibits to her affidavit. The judge found those exhibits were before him when he prepared the principal judgment.
The court said Sheehan had twice been invited to identify which documents she had lacked and explain what arguments she would have made, but did not substantiate her initial complaint. Her response affidavit and oral submissions had accepted that the delay was both inordinate and inexcusable, the judgment said.
She later argued that she had not been prepared “in a legal sense” and had been unable to present case law at the January hearing. The judge said she had had about eight months to prepare and had not explained why the authorities in her later written submission could not have been raised then. He also found that the additional case law would not have changed the outcome of the delay application.
The court distinguished a cited workplace bullying case, saying delay there had been found excusable and partly attributable to the defendants. In Sheehan’s case, the delay was conceded to be inordinate and inexcusable. The judgment also said an Ontario case she cited involved a different legal framework and circumstances.
The application to set aside the February judgment was refused. The court did not make a final costs order in this judgment. The council was given until 21 June to file submissions if it wished to pursue costs, with Sheehan’s reply due by 5 July. The proceedings were listed for final orders on 17 July 2023.