The High Court refused an Irish family’s application for leave to challenge the Minister for Justice’s refusal to extend a Chinese woman’s permission to remain in Ireland. The court held that the applicants had not established substantial grounds for judicial review, principally because they had not provided prima facie evidence that the woman was dependent on her family.
The woman, identified in the judgment as L.W., is the mother of the first applicant and grandmother of two children. She entered Ireland on a short-stay visit visa in June 2008. After two refusals to extend her permission, proceedings brought in 2008 were settled; on the day they were struck out, she received a six-month permit with conditions that did not allow her to work.
In April 2009, the family asked the Minister to grant her a longer permission on “Stamp 4” conditions. The application was refused. L.W. returned to China and sought a long-stay visa to return to Ireland, but was granted a short-stay visit visa instead. Her family then sought leave to challenge the refusal and have the application reconsidered.
The applicants argued that the Minister had failed to exercise statutory and executive discretion properly, applied an inflexible policy, and breached family-life and equality protections under the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. They also argued that an Irish citizen should be treated like an EU citizen exercising free-movement rights when seeking residence for a dependent parent.
The judge rejected the discrimination argument at the leave stage, finding that the Irish applicant was not in a situation equivalent to a non-Irish EU worker who had moved to Ireland and invoked EU free-movement rights. The court also said it was unnecessary to determine the full scope of constitutional and Convention family rights. For those rights to be engaged on the applicants’ case, they had to show dependency.
The judge said dependency required more than ordinary emotional ties and could not rest on financial help that was welcome but not shown to be necessary. The only evidence cited was the daughter’s affidavit saying the family sent money to her mother in China and that, without it, she would live a poor and difficult life. There was no affidavit from L.W. and no supporting detail about her health, ability to work, assets, living arrangements or other income. The court found that this did not amount to prima facie evidence of dependency.
The decision was a refusal of leave to seek judicial review, not a full hearing ruling on whether the Minister’s refusal was lawful. The court concluded that the applicants had not shown substantial grounds on the dependency, discretion, policy or related rights claims, and refused leave.