The High Court has refused a man’s application to amend his personal injuries claim against the Health Service Executive and ruled that his summons disclosed no reasonable cause of action. The court also said the proceedings were bound to fail and constituted an abuse of process.
The judgment was delivered electronically on 10 November 2023 by Mr Justice O’Connor. The plaintiff and members of his extended family and HSE staff were anonymised to protect the privacy and best interests of children referred to in the case.
The claim arose from an HSE investigation in 2012 into allegations of abuse involving the plaintiff’s then five-year-old niece. The plaintiff alleged that social workers asked questions that coached the child, and that the investigation was conducted negligently. He said he suffered stress and other mental health problems as a result. These were allegations in the summons; the HSE denied wrongdoing and disputed that the plaintiff had suffered a compensable injury.
The plaintiff sought to add ten pages of narrative to his summons, including a separate allegation about the questioning of another niece. The court found he had not explained why the additions were needed to determine the dispute. It described the proposed material as prolix and a “scattergun” set of accusations, and said the allegation concerning the second niece amounted to a separate cause of action. The judge also found that the plaintiff had known of that allegation since 2018 and had not shown that mental health issues could overcome a limitation defence. Leave to amend was refused.
The judge then considered the original summons on the assumption that its pleaded facts could be proved. He concluded that the HSE owed no duty of care of the kind claimed in relation to the child abuse investigation. He also found that the pleaded psychiatric injury could not meet the legal requirements for damages for psychiatric harm, including the requirement for a qualifying shock-inducing event. The court said it could not turn the personal injuries case into an inquiry into the investigation.
The judgment states that the summons was struck out under Order 19, Rule 28 of the Rules of the Superior Courts and, separately, under the court’s inherent jurisdiction. However, the final section sets out orders the court proposed to make at a hearing on 28 November 2023, subject to the plaintiff serving further written submissions of up to 1,000 words within 14 days. The proposed orders also included an order for the plaintiff to pay the HSE’s costs, including reserved and discovery costs, to be adjudicated if the parties could not agree.