The Supreme Court allowed an appeal by an anonymised applicant seeking more time to bring judicial review proceedings over the refusal to extend the deadline for a claim to the Residential Institutions Redress Board. The decision is recorded in the separate judgment of Justice Donal O’Donnell, who disagreed with the majority’s outcome.
O’Donnell J. said the majority’s decision meant the Board would have to consider an application to extend the time for a compensation claim, despite the scheme’s statutory cut-off and the long delay. He accepted that a change in legal interpretation could be relevant to an application to extend time, but said the Court of Appeal ruling relied on by the applicant was not, by itself, enough to justify extending the judicial review deadline in this case.
The applicant’s original request for an extension to make a redress claim was refused in 2008. A further request to review that refusal was rejected in 2012. O’Donnell J. said the applicant had considered bringing judicial review proceedings but decided against it, in part after receiving advice about the prospects of success and possible costs. The proceedings were begun after a 2016 Court of Appeal decision concerning the test for extending time to make claims under the redress scheme.
The judge noted that the judicial review application came more than four years after the 2012 refusal, against a normal time limit of three months. He also said the Board had processed 16,649 claims and was winding down, with the applicant’s claim described in evidence as effectively the only outstanding one at the time of the High Court application. He identified possible wider effects, including the treatment of earlier cases and the statutory bar on new claims introduced in 2011.
On a separate issue, O’Donnell J. considered the 2011 amendment to the rules governing judicial review time extensions. He said the rule-making committee had power in principle to specify grounds for extending time and did not consider the provision inherently unconstitutional. He reasoned that, on his interpretation, the applicant could meet the rule’s requirements because the timing of the later Court of Appeal decision was outside the applicant’s control and could not reasonably have been anticipated in a way that could have been avoided.
The source is O’Donnell J.’s judgment only. It records that the Supreme Court majority allowed the appeal, but does not set out the majority’s full reasoning or the formal terms of the court’s order. O’Donnell J.’s views on the late extension were dissenting; his separate discussion of the rule’s application was not the majority’s reasoning.