The High Court has remitted a dispute over judgment mortgages registered against a Rathfarnham home to the Dublin Circuit Court, finding that court could hear the claims and that no special circumstances justified keeping the case in the High Court.
Ms Justice Eileen Roberts made the decision on 28 February 2023 on an application by Pepper Finance Corporation (Ireland) DAC. She directed that the case be listed for mention on 14 March to deal with the form of order, costs and any issues arising from the judgment. The judgment does not decide the underlying dispute over the property or the mortgages.
Orla Farrelly seeks declarations that she has good and unencumbered title to the property, which she says is her principal private residence, and that Pepper has no interest in it. She also seeks orders preventing Pepper from bringing proceedings relating to the property or procuring her eviction before her case is resolved. Her statement of claim additionally seeks to set aside two earlier High Court judgments in favour of Bank of Scotland (Ireland) Limited, on which judgment mortgages were registered against the property.
Farrelly’s pleaded account is that her parents bought the property in 1980, and that her mother conveyed it into their joint names in 1993. The judgment records that the original mortgage was discharged in 1994 and a later mortgage to Allied Irish Banks was satisfied in 2006. It says a title search in late 2021 disclosed five judgment mortgages registered without Farrelly’s or her mother’s knowledge. Two were registered by Bank of Scotland in 2007 for €530,224.41 and €5,838,107.44, following judgments against Michael Lynn and, in one case, his wife Bríd Murphy.
Farrelly pleads that Bank of Scotland transferred its loan and security interests to Pepper in 2018. Pepper denies that the judgments or judgment mortgages were transferred, says it has no interest in them and argues it cannot discharge them. It also says the proceedings are against the wrong defendant. Those are the defendant’s pleaded positions, not findings made in this ruling.
The judge accepted valuation evidence that the property was worth significantly less than the €3 million threshold relevant to the jurisdictional provisions considered. She concluded that the Circuit Court could make the declaratory and injunctive orders sought. She also said the claim to set aside the earlier High Court orders was not properly maintainable in this case: Farrelly was not a party to those proceedings, and the defendant was not a party either.
On any damages claim, the judge found there was no evidence of actual loss before the court and that damages, even taking the claim at its highest, could not reasonably be expected to require High Court jurisdiction. She found no special circumstances or unusual legal issues sufficient to retain the proceedings. The judgment says Pepper’s evidence was that it had never sought to enforce the mortgages and did not intend to do so. The judge added that Pepper would be expected to provide confirmation of its absence of interest if that would assist Farrelly in seeking removal of the mortgage registrations.