The High Court has retrospectively extended Dunnes Stores' deadline for completing fitout works at the Point Village development in Dublin to 27 July 2022, while criticising the retailer's repeated delays and ordering it to pay the costs of the extension application.
The ruling follows an earlier April 2025 judgment in which Mr Justice Mark Sanfey rejected Point Village Development Limited's main contempt allegation. That allegation concerned whether Dunnes had breached earlier High Court and Court of Appeal orders by fitting out a store significantly smaller than the full floor area available for the anchor unit.
Dunnes had, however, accepted that it missed the separate deadline for completing the fitout. The operative deadline was 10 June 2022, after an extension granted by the Court of Appeal. Work did not begin until 16 June and was completed on 27 July.
Point Village argued that the delay itself amounted to serious contempt. The judge found that Dunnes' conduct involved repeated and egregious delay for which no explanation had been given. However, contempt carrying a penal sanction had to be proved beyond reasonable doubt and required conduct sufficiently serious, deliberate or outrageous. A six-week delay in this long-running commercial dispute did not meet that threshold.
The court therefore retrospectively extended the deadline to 27 July 2022. It stressed that this did not amount to approval of Dunnes' conduct.
Point Village separately asked the court to clarify the earlier orders as requiring Dunnes to fit out the entire store. That application was refused. The judge held that the size of the required anchor unit had never been determined in the original litigation, so the court could not use a liberty-to-apply provision or inherent jurisdiction to decide that new issue later under the guise of clarification.
Dunnes must pay Point Village's costs of the extension motion. The court's provisional view was that each side should bear its own costs of the wider contempt motion, subject to further submissions.