The Court of Appeal has ruled that a teacher is entitled to a jury trial in his High Court defamation action against the Health Service Executive, even though a related judicial review case raises overlapping issues.
The appeal concerned a High Court direction that the judicial review and defamation proceedings be listed together, leaving it to the trial judge to decide whether to hear them together or successively. The Court of Appeal held that the direction could not remove the teacher’s right to have the defamation case tried by a jury.
The teacher was placed on administrative leave in 2004 after a pupil’s parents complained that their son had been sexually abused. The judgment says other serious complaints followed. The teacher began judicial review proceedings challenging an HSE predecessor’s decision to validate the complaints on a preliminary basis without hearing him. That decision was quashed by consent in 2005. A second judicial review case was struck out by consent in 2006 after the HSE assured him that relevant investigation documents had been provided.
He was acquitted in three separate criminal trials in 2009 and 2010. The HSE continued its investigation. In December 2012, a senior social worker wrote to the school’s board of management that, despite the rejection of all allegations in the criminal cases, the HSE considered their outcome inconclusive. The teacher returned to work on 30 April 2013.
He later brought a third judicial review case challenging the investigation’s outcome. In a separate defamation action, he alleged that between December 2012 and June 2013 the social worker told parents, or implied, that he posed a threat to children and should not have been allowed back to work. He sought damages and a correction order. The judgment records these as allegations; it makes no finding on whether the alleged conversations occurred or were defamatory.
The High Court’s January 2015 case-management ruling followed the HSE’s application to consolidate the proceedings and give directions on trial. The Court of Appeal acknowledged the practical case-management difficulties created by the overlap, but held that the High Court had no jurisdiction to set aside the jury entitlement for efficiency reasons. It allowed the appeal and declared that the teacher was entitled to a jury trial in the defamation proceedings.
The ruling addressed the mode of trial only. It did not decide the defamation claim or the teacher’s challenge to the HSE investigation.