The Supreme Court declared that the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) acted unlawfully by conducting a public hearing significantly outside its terms of reference and the invitation issued to Angela Kerins.
In a judgment delivered on 29 May 2019, the Court addressed two questions left open after its principal judgment in Kerins v. McGuinness [2019] IESC 11: whether the Dáil should replace individual committee members and the Clerk of Dáil Éireann as defendants, and whether the PAC, considered as a whole, had significantly departed from the terms of its invitation to Kerins.
The Court said the written invitation specified examination of three areas of State funding to Rehab: HSE payments under section 29 of the Health Act 2004, payments under the Charitable Lotteries Scheme, and SOLAS payments for specialist vocational training. The Court accepted that discussions before the hearing brought Kerins’s own salary within the scope of the invitation. It said questions about governance, Rehab’s allocation of funds, other staff salaries, a company car, and a commercial relationship with Complete Eco Solutions Limited went beyond it.
The Court considered the PAC’s hearing on 27 February 2014 and a later committee meeting on 10 April. It found that at least three members, including the chair, engaged in prolonged questioning significantly outside the invitation’s scope. The Court concluded that the committee acted broadly by consensus and that there was no objection to the departures. It distinguished its finding from criticism of the tone of individual questions, saying the issue was the substance of the committee’s conduct as a whole.
The Court held that Kerins had been invited on one basis but that the PAC acted on a significantly different basis once she attended. It therefore made the declaration it had said would be appropriate if that conclusion were reached: that the PAC acted unlawfully by conducting a public hearing significantly outside its terms of reference and the invitation.
The Court also ordered the Dáil, as an institution, to replace the relevant individual respondents and the Clerk of Dáil Éireann. Ireland and the Attorney General remained respondents. The Court stressed that substituting the Dáil did not expand the courts’ jurisdiction or alter the constitutional limits on which claims could be heard. The declaration concluded the first module of the High Court trial; any issues left undetermined were for the parties to consider, with disputes about further progress to be determined initially by the High Court.