The High Court has refused a grandmother’s judicial review challenge to decisions about her access to four grandchildren who have been in the care of the Child and Family Agency (CFA) since July 2015.
In a judgment delivered on 16 January 2023, Ms Justice Niamh Hyland refused leave to challenge District Court orders made between 2015 and 2018, finding the challenges were brought outside the time limit or had become moot. She also rejected the grandmother’s substantive challenge to a Circuit Court decision of 20 February 2020. The applicant was self-represented.
The children were placed in care under interim, emergency and care orders. The grandmother was not a party to those childcare proceedings and was not in loco parentis. The CFA said it was open to facilitating access, but had concerns about whether she could act protectively after one child made allegations of sexual abuse against a third party. It said access required meaningful engagement with the agency. The grandmother said the CFA had acted hostilely and unlawfully failed to facilitate access.
The High Court declined to consider her challenge to the July 2015 Emergency Care Order because she was significantly out of time and had shown no basis to extend the deadline. It refused leave to challenge a September 2017 order restricting contact, noting that its terms had not been provided to the court and that a later order had overtaken it. The judge described the failure to communicate the earlier order’s terms to the grandmother as “deeply unsatisfactory”.
The judge also found that the grandmother had not been notified in advance of the January 2018 hearing at which a contact restriction was reiterated, and had not been heard on that issue. She described this as a breach of fair procedures. However, she refused leave because the challenge was late and the order had been overtaken by later decisions. The two November 2018 District Court refusals of access were also out of time to challenge by judicial review.
The Circuit Court had affirmed those access refusals in February 2020. It decided that access was not then in the children’s best interests, while noting that the position was not fixed and access might be prepared for. Its order required the grandmother to meet with the CFA and engage with preparatory work, including an independent assessment; any access could remain supervised. It also directed that contact with the children be made through the CFA.
Justice Hyland found no basis to overturn that decision through judicial review. She said several of the grandmother’s arguments challenged the merits or conduct of the CFA rather than the legality of the court order, and that an application under section 37 of the Child Care Act 1991 remained an available route if circumstances changed. She granted leave on some grounds, including an Article 8 family-life argument, but rejected them substantively. The court granted none of the relief sought and refused the application.