The High Court ordered the Board of Management of Rosmini Community School to pay Emer Lally’s costs of an interlocutory injunction application after it unsuccessfully opposed a pause to its disciplinary process.
In a judgment delivered on 17 December 2021, Ms Justice Butler ruled on costs arising from her 4 October decision to restrain the school from holding a disciplinary hearing into allegations against Lally. The injunction remains tied to the determination of legal proceedings in which Lally challenges the fairness and validity of the disciplinary process.
The costs ruling did not decide whether the school’s process was unfair or biased, whether the allegations against Lally were true, or how the substantive proceedings should be resolved. Butler said those questions were separate from whether the disciplinary process should proceed before the legal challenge was determined.
The school argued that the costs should be left to the trial or, alternatively, that Lally should recover her costs only if she ultimately succeeded in the proceedings. It said the issues raised in the injunction application would be revisited at trial and that it would be unfair to make it pay those costs if it later won.
Lally argued that the rules required the court to decide costs when determining an interlocutory application, unless it could not do so justly. The judge said the rules and the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015 create a statutory preference for costs to follow the event, subject to the court’s discretion. She said the circumstances for postponing a costs decision were limited.
Butler found that the injunction application raised a discrete question about the timing of the disciplinary process relative to the litigation. That issue could be resolved without deciding the outcome of either the disciplinary process or the substantive case. The school had been entitled to defend the integrity of its process, but could have agreed to suspend it without conceding that the process was invalid. Having refused to postpone the hearing and then lost the injunction dispute, the school was ordered to pay Lally’s costs of that application.
The judge also made an order in terms proposed by Lally’s solicitors. The judgment records that the school had not formally consented to the proposed terms, but had raised no objection.