The Supreme Court has dismissed Eddie Kershaw’s appeal against a High Court order setting aside permission to bring a judicial review challenge to Ireland’s seatbelt and penalty-points laws.
In a judgment delivered on 21 June 2016, Mr Justice William McKechnie said the challenge was bound to fail. The appeal concerned the High Court’s decision to set aside an earlier order granting leave for judicial review; it did not determine the validity of later convictions that Kershaw said he was challenging in separate proceedings.
Kershaw argued that wearing a seatbelt could prevent him escaping quickly if he were stopped and assaulted by abusive members of An Garda Síochána. He said the requirement breached his constitutional rights to life and bodily integrity. He also relied on a former exemption for taxi, hackney and limousine drivers, arguing that it recognised the need for a quick escape from potential attackers inside their vehicles.
The Court said it would not decide whether Kershaw’s allegations about his dealings with gardaí were true. It held, however, that the former taxi-driver exemption did not support his argument: the circumstances he described involved alleged attacks from outside his vehicle, and the exemption had been removed in 2004. The judge concluded that the extra time needed to remove a seatbelt did not justify exemption from a law intended to protect the public. He found no credible basis for saying the seatbelt requirement endangered Kershaw’s life or violated his bodily integrity.
The judgment also addressed the procedure for setting aside leave granted in judicial review cases. It said courts may set aside such an order where proceedings disclose no reasonable cause of action or are clearly doomed to fail, while exercising that jurisdiction sparingly. The Supreme Court concluded that this case met that threshold.
An earlier stay on prosecutions and execution of convictions had lapsed when the High Court set aside leave in 2009. The Supreme Court refused Kershaw’s later application for a stay in 2013. The judgment records that he was convicted of 13 seatbelt offences in October 2013 and a further 13 in January 2014, with a ten-year driving disqualification imposed after the latter convictions. It also records that a separate judicial review application later secured a stay on execution of those convictions.
Kershaw’s request to pursue a natural-law argument was not before the Court as an appealable issue: the judgment said no order granting permission to appeal that issue existed. The Court also said this appeal was not an appropriate forum for his newly raised damages claim against the State, and observed that no discernible cause of action had been identified. It dismissed the appeal.