The High Court has struck out four cases brought by John Cronin against public figures over a long-running dispute about payment for dredging work at Dingle Pier, but declined to restrict his ability to bring future proceedings against the State.
In a judgment delivered on 23 March 2023, Ms Justice Siobhán Phelan ruled that the cases disclosed no reasonable cause of action, were bound to fail and could not be saved by amendment. She also found that allowing them to proceed would be an abuse of court process. The court will hear the parties further on the form of the orders and consequential matters.
The four proceedings named Barry Cowen, Drew Harris, and Helen McEntee and Paul Gallagher. A separate case against Micheál Martin was also before the judge, making five defendants across four related applications. The claims included allegations of failures by public officials to act on Cronin’s complaints about a dispute between his company and Irishenco Construction over dredging work at Dingle Pier in 1999 and 2000. Cronin claimed his company carried out more work than it was paid for. Those allegations were his claims, not findings by the court.
The judge said the contract for the dredging work was between Cronin’s company and Irishenco, and that no contractual relationship linked him to the defendants in these proceedings. She found no pleaded facts showing the special circumstances needed to establish a duty of care or statutory duty by the public defendants. She also concluded that the claims about the project were brought more than six years after the work and were statute-barred.
Other claims concerned Cronin’s 2013 imprisonment, an alleged assault in prison, and alleged failures by Gardaí to investigate complaints, including a complaint about the High Court Central Office. The judge said the assault and committal claims could not now be maintained against the defendants named, and found that the claims about failures to investigate lacked particularised facts establishing an actionable case. She said the proceedings could not be revived by recasting them as fraud claims.
The judge did not grant the defendants’ request for an Isaac Wunder order, which would have required Cronin to obtain court permission before bringing specified further cases. She said the evidence did not establish a pattern of repeatedly pursuing vexatious or unmeritorious claims that justified such an order at this stage. She noted that the four cases appeared to be the first court determination of these claims. The judgment said the issues decided by the strike-out orders should not be relitigated between the same parties unless the orders are set aside on appeal, and warned that renewed proceedings could prompt a later application for a filing restriction.