The High Court has ordered each side to bear its own legal costs after Barry Sheehan withdrew a judicial review concerning a fixed charge parking notice and the status of a road in the area where he resides.
In a judgment delivered on 19 December 2023, Mr Justice Garrett Simons said the evidence before the court established that the road had been declared a public road. Sheehan accepted that he could not succeed on that part of his case, and the judge said the challenge was based on an incorrect factual basis and could not succeed.
The case concerned a fixed charge penalty notice issued by Cork City Council over Sheehan’s vehicle, parked on 24 September 2021. He had sought an order quashing the notice, arguing that the road was not a public road under the Road Traffic Acts. The council’s opposition papers initially relied on acts of dedication and acceptance as a public right of way. Shortly before the hearing listed for 14 November 2023, the council produced records showing that the road had been declared a public road in 1961.
The judge said the council’s new ground of opposition changed the complexion of the case. The records had been found after an online search of newspaper archives in November 2023, followed by examination of meeting minutes held at the City and County Archives. Simons said there was no obvious reason the research could not have been done before the council filed its opposition papers in July 2022. The late disclosure led Sheehan to pursue the case further than he otherwise would have and meant the scheduled hearing had to be vacated.
The judge also considered Sheehan’s challenge to the Cork City Council Parking Bye-Laws 2016. That challenge had become moot after new bye-laws were adopted on 14 March 2022 and came into effect on 1 May 2022. The process for making the new bye-laws had begun before the judicial review was brought, the court said.
Simons declined to award costs to either side. He said the council should not recover costs it would ordinarily have been entitled to, given its late change in position. But awarding costs to Sheehan would reward an unsuccessful applicant, and he had been able to seek the relevant record in publicly accessible archives.
The court made no order as to costs under Part 11 of the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015 and struck out the proceedings with no further order.