The High Court has struck out two proceedings brought by Dolores Mannion against the Minister for Justice, the Attorney General and Ireland, finding that they sought to re-litigate matters already decided or that could have been raised earlier.
Mr Justice Max Barrett delivered the judgment on 1 June 2017. The motions were brought by the second, third and fourth-named defendants in two cases, numbered 2010/11464P and 2013/13515P. The court granted orders striking out both proceedings against those defendants. The judgment does not say that the Legal Aid Board was included in these motions or in the strike-out orders.
The cases arose from Ms Mannion’s long-running disputes connected to litigation over a property purchase in Tralee. She argued, among other things, that the Civil Legal Aid Act 1995 permitted the Legal Aid Board to act unconstitutionally and that the Minister and Attorney General needed to be parties to a challenge to the legislation.
The court noted that Ms Mannion had previously challenged the legal aid arrangements in judicial review proceedings. The High Court dismissed that application in 2007, finding no failure by the respondents to meet the requirements of natural or constitutional justice; the Supreme Court dismissed her appeal in 2010. The judgment in the present cases said the earlier finding had not been overturned.
Justice Barrett considered complaints in Ms Mannion’s pleadings about earlier High Court decisions to be matters for appeal. He said the High Court was not competent to adjudicate complaints about the Supreme Court’s conduct. He also referred to the Supreme Court’s observation that the constitutionality of the 1995 Act had not been pleaded in the earlier case but could have been.
The judge held that the new proceedings were frivolous and vexatious and an abuse of process. He also found that res judicata barred re-litigation of the earlier constitutional-justice finding, and that the Henderson v. Henderson rule applied because the challenge to the Act could have been advanced in the earlier proceedings, where Ms Mannion had legal representation.
The court said any one of those grounds would have been sufficient to strike out the proceedings, and that all three applied. The order was limited to the two cases against the second, third and fourth-named defendants.