The High Court has refused Angela Kerins’s application for documents held by Dáil Éireann in her damages action over Public Accounts Committee proceedings, holding that the requested material concerned constitutionally protected parliamentary speech and debate.
In a judgment delivered on 29 July 2022, Mr Justice Alexander Owens said the court could not entertain the discovery application because deciding the underlying claim would require it to assess committee members’ utterances and treatment of Kerins. The court dismissed her application. It did not make an order on Dáil Éireann’s separate application for documents from Kerins; that application was adjourned generally, with liberty to re-enter if an appellate court disagreed with the judge’s reasoning.
Kerins alleges that committee members attacked her character during a public session on 27 February 2014 and in later proceedings, harming her health and causing loss. She claims they knowingly abused their powers. Her discovery request covered committee material from late 2013 to July 2014, including records of private sessions, legal advice and material she said could bear on members’ knowledge, intentions and conduct. Those are allegations and grounds advanced for seeking the documents, not findings made in this judgment.
The judgment records that the Supreme Court had previously found the committee acted unlawfully in two respects concerning the 27 February 2014 session: it acted significantly outside its terms of reference and questioned and commented on matters that departed significantly from the invitation to Kerins. That declaration did not extend to committee comments made in public sessions on 13 March and 10 April 2014, which Kerins also cited in her damages claim.
Mr Justice Owens held that constitutional protections extend beyond words spoken in committee sessions to closely connected committee work and records, including private-session records, secretariat material and legal advice. He said a court could not compel disclosure for use in a claim that required judgment on the propriety of committee utterances. The judgment states that the claim for misfeasance in public office is not maintainable if that reasoning is correct; it did not decide liability for damages.
Dáil Éireann also relied on standing orders adopted in 2015 restricting access to official documents. The judge concluded that the requested documents fell within those rules and that Kerins’s application did not meet an exception. He described the case as outside the exceptional, very rare circumstances in which court intervention in parliamentary affairs might be justified.