The High Court has dismissed Stepstone Mortgage Funding Limited’s preliminary objection to being named as a respondent in Ray and Susan Hall’s application for leave to seek judicial review of a Circuit Court possession order.
Mr Justice Richard Humphreys ruled on 16 November 2015 that the 2015 judicial review rules required the other party to the underlying court proceedings to be named as a respondent when the application sought to quash a court order. The judge who made the possession order was correctly left out of the case title, he said.
The Halls’ leave application seeks to quash an order for possession of their family home made by Judge Leonie Reynolds in the Circuit Court in Trim on 16 July 2015. The High Court had directed that Stepstone, which had applied for the possession order, be put on notice. Stepstone argued that it was a private entity with no public law function and that no decision of its own was being challenged.
The High Court said judicial review must concern an underlying public law function, but the respondent need not itself perform that function. Here, the application concerned an order made by a Circuit Court judge. Under the rules, the other party to those proceedings was the appropriate respondent, while the judge was not to be named in the title.
The court also rejected the suggestion that the Halls’ complaints about the judge’s decision and the fairness of the hearing amounted to an allegation of personal misconduct serious enough to require the judge to be named. The judge said the amended papers made no allegation of mala fides and that a complaint about fair procedures did not, by itself, reach the required level of gravity.
The question of whether the State should be joined as a notice party was left for the decision on the leave application. The court did not decide whether the Halls should be granted leave, whether the possession order should be quashed, or other issues Stepstone raised, including alternative remedies and alleged inaccuracies in an affidavit.
The High Court refused the Halls’ request to withdraw their original grounding affidavit, while leaving them free to tell the court they no longer relied on it and to rely on any later affidavit. Costs of the preliminary issue were reserved until the leave application is determined. The court said it would hear the parties further to bring that application to a conclusion.