The High Court has dismissed a negligence claim brought by Lorcan Roche Kelly over Garda failures to provide courts with information about offences committed by Gerry McGrath, who later murdered Roche Kelly’s wife, Sylvia, in December 2007. The court said the failures were “negligent and disgraceful” but found that the legal requirements for a duty of care to the deceased were not met.
The defendants had applied under Order 19, rule 28 of the Rules of the Superior Courts to have the claim struck out as disclosing no reasonable cause of action and being bound to fail. The case sought damages under Part IV of the Civil Liability Act 1961 on behalf of Roche Kelly, his children and other family members.
The judgment’s chronology said McGrath was arrested in October 2007 at the scene of an abduction and false imprisonment in Dundrum, Co Tipperary, and remanded in custody. At a Limerick District Court bail hearing on 30 October, gardaí objected to bail but did not bring a separate Cavan taxi-driver assault case to the judge’s attention. McGrath was admitted to bail. On 3 December, he appeared at Virginia District Court on charges including assault causing harm and was remanded on continuing bail. The judgment said no application was made to revoke bail. He murdered Sylvia Roche Kelly five days later.
Roche Kelly’s claim alleged, among other things, that gardaí failed to inform the courts of the relevant charges and failed to seek revocation of bail. The defendants argued that there was no special relationship between the gardaí and the deceased or her family, no assumption of special responsibility, and no pleaded basis to find the murder foreseeable.
The court considered the claim at the preliminary strike-out stage, taking pleaded facts as true. It accepted that judges informed of the full circumstances would have refused or revoked bail, while acknowledging that the decision ultimately belonged to the courts. It also rejected the argument that a prior ruling allowing a different negligence case to proceed created a general exception to the principles limiting police liability.
The judge found no sufficient proximity between Sylvia Roche Kelly and McGrath, who were unknown to each other, and no special responsibility assumed by the Gardaí toward her. The previous incidents, involving different victims and locations, did not make her death reasonably foreseeable on the pleaded facts. The court therefore dismissed the claim because the established principles for a duty of care were absent. It said the decision was not based on a blanket immunity for the Gardaí.