The High Court has ordered the defendants in Martina Kelly’s case to furnish statements from a Garda investigation file, while upholding their claim to privilege over the remainder of the file.
The application concerned a privilege claim over an investigation into a criminal complaint lodged by Kelly and her husband after they received a 49-page document on 26 September 2013.
Kelly has proceedings against the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána, the Minister for Justice and Equality, Ireland and the Attorney General. Her husband, Mark Kelly, has separate proceedings alleging that he suffered bullying and harassment by a sergeant identified in the judgment as Sergeant D, and that the defendants failed to investigate those allegations. The judgment describes Martina Kelly’s action as similar and “in almost identical terms”.
Mr Justice Barr said the discovery order and privilege claim in Martina Kelly’s case were identical to those in her husband’s proceedings. The court had already ruled on the privilege issue in Mark Kelly’s case, and said it was unnecessary to repeat those findings.
Applying the reasons given in that earlier judgment, the court directed the defendants to furnish the statements identified there as contained in item G4 of an affidavit of discovery sworn by Inspector Reynolds on 5 February 2020. It upheld privilege over the other documents in the Garda investigation file.
The judgment does not specify the statements’ contents. It also does not set out a final order or a decision on costs. Because the judgment was delivered electronically, the parties were given four weeks to provide brief written submissions on the terms of the final order, costs and any other matters that might arise.