The Supreme Court has directed that damages awarded to Paul Morrissey be reduced by €575,000 against the Health Service Executive, Quest Diagnostics Incorporated and Medlab Pathology Limited. The Court also ordered that appeal costs be shared jointly and severally: two thirds against all three defendants and the remaining third against the HSE and Quest.
The directions were made in a supplemental judgment delivered by Chief Justice Frank Clarke on 23 July 2020. They followed the Court’s principal judgment in the appeals, which had addressed the defendants’ challenges to the High Court decision. This supplemental judgment dealt with the form of the substantive order and the costs of the appeals.
Medlab had appealed the amount of damages and succeeded on one part of its appeal. The parties agreed that the result required a €575,000 reduction in the damages awarded to Mr. Morrissey against Medlab. Neither the HSE nor Quest had appealed the damages amount. They nevertheless asked the Supreme Court to apply the same reduction to the awards against them. Ruth and Paul Morrissey argued that those awards should remain unchanged.
Chief Justice Clarke said there were competing considerations. The HSE and Quest had chosen not to appeal quantum, but all three appeals arose from the same High Court proceedings, were heard together and shared many issues. In the Court’s view, they amounted in substance to a single appeal, despite being three separate appeals in procedural terms. In the unusual circumstances, the Court considered it more just to apply the reduction to all three defendants. It proposed that all three appeals be allowed only to that extent and dismissed in all other respects, consistent with the principal judgment.
On costs, the Court treated the appeals as one procedure. It said Medlab’s partial success entitled it to some costs, and set the Morrisseys’ costs against Medlab at two thirds of the total appeal costs. The final proposed order awarded two thirds of the costs jointly and severally against all three defendants, with the remaining third jointly and severally against the HSE and Quest. The Court made no ruling on how the defendants should allocate costs or contributions among themselves.
The judgment noted that the Government of Ireland had agreed before the appeal that the Morrisseys would receive the full High Court damages regardless of the appeals’ outcome, and that the damages had been paid. It said the reduction could therefore affect how the payment burden fell among the defendants. The judgment also recorded Ruth Morrissey’s death between the hearing of submissions and delivery of the supplemental judgment.