The High Court has found that landlord Daniel Morrissey is liable to Da Pinos restaurant operator Manuel Jiminez for disrepair of a leaking roof at the premises at the junction of Parliament Street and Cork Hill in Dublin city centre.
Mr Jiminez operated the restaurant under a 33-year lease dating from December 1993. The judgment records that he had complained for seven or eight years about rainwater entering the kitchen area through a flat roof at the rear of the premises. Remedial work carried out in 2002 had failed to solve the problem.
The dispute turned largely on two linked leases. The McGrath defendants had granted Mr Morrissey a 999-year lease of Units 1 and 2 in 1992, but retained the main structural parts of the building, including the roof. Mr Morrissey subsequently leased the restaurant premises to Mr Jiminez.
Mr Morrissey argued that because the roof had never been transferred to him, his repairing obligations could not extend to it. Mr Justice O’Neill rejected that interpretation. He found that clause 5.4 of the 1993 lease expressly required Mr Morrissey to keep parts of the estate not demised to Mr Jiminez, including the roof, in good repair.
The judge said Mr Morrissey could require the superior landlords to honour their own repair obligations or could instead face damages claimed by Mr Jiminez. The judgment does not quantify any damages.
Mr Jiminez also argued that the continuing leak breached his covenant for quiet and peaceful enjoyment. The court rejected that part of the case. It found that the intermittent leak, while an irritation, had not been shown to interfere with the restaurant to the substantial degree necessary for such a breach.
The court additionally found that Mr Jiminez had failed for a considerable period to pay service charges due under his lease. That default independently prevented him from relying on the quiet-enjoyment covenant, which applied only while the tenant performed his own lease obligations.