The High Court has refused relief to a former Cork Prison prisoner who challenged his exclusion from a State compensation scheme for people subjected to slopping out. The court held that he had not shown the scheme’s limitation rule was unfair in his individual circumstances or that Irish law had provided no effective remedy before the Supreme Court’s 2019 Simpson judgment.
The applicant was detained in Cork Prison for periods between March 2013 and April 2014. The judgment says he had no in-cell sanitation and had to use a bucket in his cell, sometimes in the presence of other prisoners, before emptying it in the morning.
The State Claims Agency introduced a settlement scheme in February 2020 after Simpson, which awarded damages for a constitutional rights breach in the conditions established in that case. The scheme required that a claim, or at least part of it, not be statute-barred. The applicant applied in November 2020 and again more formally in March 2021. His application was refused by letter on 27 May 2021 because it was considered statute-barred.
He sought judicial review of that refusal, arguing that the scheme’s time bar denied him an effective remedy and should not be applied to his claim. His case included arguments under the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. The respondents argued, among other things, that the proceedings were out of time and that his case lacked sufficient evidence about his personal circumstances.
The judge rejected the respondents’ time-limit objection. The statement of opposition had not clearly pleaded that the three-month judicial review period ran from an earlier refusal in November 2020, rather than the May 2021 letter. The court said the objection was not pleaded with enough precision to support that argument.
However, the judge found the applicant had not explained why he made no complaint during his detention or in the following years, why he did not bring a claim after a 2017 High Court ruling in Simpson, or why he waited until November 2020 to apply to the scheme. The court also rejected his argument that no effective remedy existed before the Supreme Court’s Simpson ruling. It found that ruling had applied pre-existing constitutional rights and that earlier cases showed a route to challenge prison conditions.
The judge concluded that the applicant had not established that the limitation rule was unconstitutional or contrary to the Convention, or that it caused unfairness in his particular circumstances. The court therefore refused the relief claimed. It did not decide whether the absence of a direct challenge to the scheme itself would independently have barred relief.