The High Court has dismissed Thomas Clarke’s appeal against the dismissal of his personal injury proceedings, holding that the claim was statute barred. The court ruled that the limitation period was not suspended until his solicitors supplied the alleged accident date to the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB) in December 2016.
Clarke’s Circuit Court proceedings sought damages for an alleged accident at Wheatfield Prison on 15 June 2012. His claim was that a stack of wooden planks fell on him. The defendants—the Governor of Wheatfield Prison and the Irish Prison Service—pleaded that the proceedings were outside the statutory time limit.
Clarke’s solicitors sent PIAB an application on 22 January 2014, within two years of the alleged accident. The form left blank the date and time of the incident. PIAB repeatedly sought the missing date and other information. The solicitors supplied the date of 15 June 2012 by letter dated 14 December 2016. PIAB treated that as the date the application was complete for the purpose of the statutory standstill period.
The Circuit Court decided the limitation issue against Clarke and dismissed the proceedings on 7 November 2017. Clarke appealed. At the High Court hearing, the defendants accepted the facts set out in affidavits filed for Clarke and his solicitor for the purpose of deciding the preliminary issue.
Mr Justice Garrett Simons said the relevant rules required an application to contain information specified by PIAB. The application form required the accident date, which the judge said was central to assessing the claim and notifying the parties against whom damages were sought. The omission could not be treated as a minor failure that might be overlooked.
The judge expressed concern that the rules did not themselves set out all the information required in an application, and said the approach of specifying information by other means was unsatisfactory. But Clarke had not challenged the rules’ validity, and the appeal was not a judicial review proceeding. The judge therefore applied the rules as they stood.
He concluded that the application was not “made” for the purposes of the statutory standstill until 14 December 2016, when the missing date was provided. By then, the two-year limitation period had expired. The judge said the standstill provision did not revive a stale claim. He dismissed the appeal, affirmed the Circuit Court’s order dismissing the proceedings as statute barred, and ordered Clarke to pay the defendants’ costs in both courts, to be taxed if not agreed.