The High Court has refused the State’s request to hold a preliminary hearing on whether part of a former Bethany Home resident’s claim is out of time, and ordered the State to disclose specified records about the home’s exclusion from the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme.
Mr Justice Dignam, in a judgment delivered on 11 October 2022, said the defendants had shown a sufficient basis to consider their time-bar arguments at a preliminary hearing. He did not decide whether the claim was time-barred or whether the limitation provisions applied.
The plaintiff, Derek Leinster, brought proceedings alleging that the State failed to provide an effective remedy for abuse he says he suffered as a child, and that the exclusion of Bethany Home residents from redress was unlawful and discriminatory. Those are claims in the proceedings, not findings made in this judgment. The defendants accepted the pleaded facts for the purpose of their application.
The State argued that the claim about Bethany Home’s original exclusion from the scheme could be separated from a later claim about the failure to provide redress after a Commission of Investigation reported on mother and baby homes. It said an early decision on the limitation issue could narrow the case and reduce discovery. The plaintiff disputed that division, arguing that the alleged failures formed a continuing course of conduct.
The judge found significant links between the two aspects of the case. Even if the original exclusion claim were held to be out of time, records about why Bethany Home was excluded might remain relevant to the later claim. He therefore could not be confident that a preliminary ruling would eliminate the need to examine those records. He also weighed the plaintiff’s age against the additional delay likely to arise from a separate hearing and appeals, which both sides said they would pursue if unsuccessful.
The court declined to depart from the usual approach of hearing the case as a whole. It then considered the plaintiff’s discovery application and ordered disclosure in two categories: documents containing or referring to the reasons Bethany Home was not included in the scheme’s schedule, from June 2001 to July 2005; and documents setting out criteria for including or excluding institutions during April 2002 to July 2005, insofar as they related to Bethany Home. The first category includes relevant interdepartmental correspondence from April 2002 to July 2005.
The court did not order the broader categories originally sought, including submissions made by Protestant institutions, and did not grant advance liberty to seek further discovery. It allowed 15 weeks for the defendants to make discovery. The judgment decided these procedural applications only; the underlying claims remain to be determined.