The High Court has refused Darren Proudfoot permission to bring a defamation action against MGN Limited outside the one-year limitation period, leaving the newspaper publisher entitled to rely on that time limit.
Mr Justice Barr delivered the ruling on 19 December 2019. The application concerned a passage in an Irish Daily Mirror article published on 26 January 2018, which reported that a French court had heard that Mr Proudfoot was “a known dealer” and had been under surveillance in his home country.
Mr Proudfoot alleged the report was untrue and that the statement had not been made about him in the French proceedings. He sought a direction under section 11(2)(c)(ii) of the Statute of Limitations 1957, which allows the court to permit a defamation action to be brought within a longer period, up to two years.
In his affidavits, Mr Proudfoot said he learned of the article while imprisoned in France, where he was held from 17 January to 13 August 2018. He said he contacted solicitors after returning to Ireland, gave a former solicitor detailed instructions in late October 2018, and believed that solicitor was progressing the case. The former solicitor later said he was unwilling to act, according to Mr Proudfoot. His current solicitors were instructed on 14 February 2019; they wrote to MGN on 19 March and filed the application on 28 March.
The court accepted that Mr Proudfoot was probably not in a position to instruct a solicitor while imprisoned. But it found that he had given detailed instructions to a solicitor about three months before the one-year limit expired. The judgment held that a client could not rely on a solicitor’s alleged failure to issue proceedings in time to deprive the defendant of the limitation defence where the relevant statement, publisher and publication date were readily ascertainable.
The judge concluded that allowing the action to proceed would not serve the interests of justice. He also found that Mr Proudfoot had not shown that the prejudice he would suffer from being refused permission would significantly outweigh the prejudice to MGN. The judgment said that, if Mr Proudfoot’s account of the former solicitor’s inaction were correct, he could pursue a negligence claim against that solicitor for the lost opportunity to bring the defamation action.
The court refused the application. It did not decide whether the article was defamatory or whether Mr Proudfoot would have succeeded in a defamation action.