The High Court has ordered the plaintiff in a settled personal injuries action to provide the Teaching Council with the pleadings exchanged in the case, subject to safeguards intended to protect the plaintiff’s anonymity.
In a judgment delivered on 21 December 2020, Mr Justice David Keane varied a reporting restriction made under section 27 of the Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2008. The variation permits the pleadings to be disclosed to the Teaching Council for the limited purpose set out in the order. It does not permit their general publication.
The Council had initially sought the case title and record number or, alternatively, the defendants’ names. It said it needed the information to determine whether the two Christian Brother defendants were registered teachers and whether action might be warranted under its fitness-to-teach procedures. The application arose after newspaper reports described a personal injuries action alleging sexual assaults by two Christian Brothers and a former scout leader when the plaintiff was a schoolboy in the 1970s. Those allegations were not findings in this application.
The action had been called for trial in July 2019. The State defendants had been discontinued from it, and the remaining parties told the court on 25 July that the case had settled. On 17 October 2019, the High Court struck out the proceedings with no further order.
The Council later identified the likely case and defendants from court records. It told the court that searches of the teachers’ register produced no match for a teacher of the relevant age, but said it could not be certain because of possible Irish-language name variants.
Mr Justice Keane said the Council’s application was not an inquiry into an existing fitness-to-teach complaint. The statutory powers it relied on to obtain information applied after a complaint had been referred for investigation. The Council was instead seeking information to help decide whether to make a complaint. The judge said the Council had not persuaded him that child-protection concerns justified disclosure in these circumstances, given the statutory vetting procedures and the results of the Council’s searches.
The judge also found that naming the defendants could increase the risk of identifying the plaintiff through the combination of details already reported. The plaintiff’s solicitor had told the Council that the plaintiff would abide by the court’s decision. The judge treated this as no objection, rather than consent, and said it tilted the balance in favour of some disclosure.
The order requires the Council to provide an undertaking to pay the plaintiff’s reasonable costs of discovery. Information from the pleadings is restricted to people involved in any resulting fitness-to-teach process and those necessarily associated with it. Any disciplinary hearing and adverse finding must be anonymised as needed to protect the plaintiff. The judgment directed the parties to try to agree any remaining matters, including costs, and set 25 January 2021 as the deadline for written submissions if they disagreed.