The High Court has refused an application by John Fleury to add new grounds to a judicial review challenging 29 summons. Mr Justice Hedigan said the proposed amendment came almost nine years after the relevant test results had been provided and would greatly enlarge proceedings that were ready for a full hearing.
The judgment, cited as [2012] IEHC 543, concerned an application to amend grounds in a judicial review for which leave had been granted in October 2002. An order was amended later that month to add a further ground. The Minister for Agriculture, Food and Rural Development was the respondent, and District Judge Mary O’Halloran was named as notice party.
The proposed grounds argued that recent developments involving gland tests suggested the Minister had known that the cattle in question had not tested positive for brucellosis, and that this indicated mala fides. The judge said uncontradicted evidence from Jevon Alcock, for the respondent, was that the test results had been handed to Aisling Meehan, the applicant’s solicitor, on 6 May 2003. No satisfactory explanation had been given for waiting almost nine years to raise the results as fresh grounds.
The judgment records that the 29 summons included charges concerning animal movements, possession of passports and failures to make entries in a herd register. The judge said whether the animals were infected with brucellosis was not relevant to those charges. He noted that only one animal was involved in a charge against Fleury, which concerned an alleged failure to have a 30-day pre-movement test.
The judge also said any issue of mala fides could be addressed by the trial judge when weighing evidence and witness credibility. He doubted that the proposed issue could properly have formed admissible grounds in 2003, and said it did not amount to an arguable point given when the tests were supplied and their irrelevance to the charges.
The court refused the application to amend the judicial review grounds. The judgment addressed only that amendment application; it said the substantive judicial review was ready to proceed and might be heard within months.