The High Court dismissed proceedings brought by retired civil servant Pascal Hosford, finding they were irregularly issued and amounted to an abuse of process. Mr Justice Garrett Simons said the ruling did not decide the merits of Hosford’s arguments about deductions from his pay and pension.
The proceedings concerned three strands of a long-running dispute. Hosford challenged deductions made when he retired from the Department of Social Protection in November 2019, sought to contest the legal position taken in an earlier case about his reassignment within the Department, and sought declarations about who could challenge the treatment of certain company directors for social insurance purposes.
The deductions totalled €8,866.30. The Department said they recovered an overpayment of sick pay for a period between February and June 2019. The Workplace Relations Commission adjudication officer found that the deduction from accrued non-statutory leave pay was lawful, but that the officer had no jurisdiction over the pension lump-sum deduction. Hosford appealed to the Labour Court, where the appeal was pending and listed for hearing on 16 March 2021.
Justice Simons held that Hosford’s claims concerning the deductions and the statutory process should have been brought by judicial review. By issuing a notice of motion instead, he had bypassed safeguards including the requirement to obtain leave and show arguable grounds. The judge said that was particularly significant because Hosford was actively pursuing a statutory appeal. The proceedings’ form could not be corrected without prejudice to the respondents’ procedural rights.
The judge stressed that he was not ruling on whether the Payment of Wages Act 1991 was valid or how it should be interpreted. He said the claims were dismissed because of the way Hosford had brought them in the circumstances, and noted that routes to the High Court remained available through a Labour Court referral on a question of law or a statutory appeal on a point of law.
A separate claim sought to challenge submissions made for the Minister for Social Protection in Hosford’s earlier judicial review over a 2013 reassignment. The High Court had rejected that challenge in 2015, and Hosford did not appeal. Justice Simons found the new claim attempted to relitigate an issue already decided and was an abuse of process.
The remaining declarations sought to establish that Hosford, or a member of the Oireachtas, had standing to bring unspecified proceedings concerning company directors’ social insurance status. The judge said standing could not be decided in the abstract and dismissed those claims for disclosing no reasonable cause of action.
The respondents were entirely successful. The judge said they were prima facie entitled to costs, but invited written submissions if Hosford wished to argue for a different order.