The High Court has refused an applicant’s request to revisit an earlier ruling denying his bid to have substantive judicial review proceedings heard in private or anonymised. It also refused his request to refer five proposed questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Conleth Bradley on 22 October 2024, concerns an interlocutory stage of the case. The underlying judicial review challenges the Revenue Commissioners’ refusal to erase data relating to the applicant’s 2007 tax return under the General Data Protection Regulation’s right to erasure.
In May 2024, the court refused the applicant’s request for the substantive proceedings to be heard in camera or anonymised. The present application sought to reopen that decision and obtain an EU law reference. The applicant argued, among other things, that EU data protection rights supported anonymisation and questioned whether Irish law adequately provided remedies for alleged data protection breaches. Those were the applicant’s submissions, not findings made in this judgment.
The proposed questions addressed the compatibility of section 117 of the Data Protection Act 2018 with EU law, the use of domestic tax law in a data protection dispute, provisions concerning tax authorities, the relationship between historic domestic case law and Article 17 of the GDPR, and the court’s discretion to hold proceedings otherwise than in public.
Mr Justice Bradley said the applicant had not shown strong reasons to revisit the May decision, established a fundamental manifest error, or identified new facts with a significant bearing on its findings. The judge also considered that a CJEU ruling was not necessary to decide the applications, which arose at an interlocutory stage. He noted that the High Court was not a court of final remedy under the TFEU and that the applicant had a right of appeal to the Court of Appeal.
The court refused both the request to revisit the earlier ruling and the request for a CJEU reference. It listed the matter for 17 December 2024 to deal with costs. The judgment does not decide the underlying judicial review challenge to the Revenue Commissioners’ refusal to erase the tax-return data.