The Court of Appeal has allowed Fidelma and Owen Gaffney to continue their civil actions over an alleged Garda entry and assault, overturning a High Court order that had struck out both cases for delay.
The appeal court said there had been an inordinate and inexcusable period of about three years and five months without activity in the proceedings. But it found that the balance of justice favoured letting the claims proceed, given the absence of specific prejudice identified by the defendants, the two criminal trials arising from the alleged incident, and the shorter overall delay compared with other cases considered by the court.
The claims concern an alleged incident at the Gaffneys’ home on 17 February 2008. The judgment records that they alleged Gardaí entered without a valid warrant and assaulted them. Their civil proceedings, issued in May 2010, claim negligence, assault, trespass, false imprisonment and breaches of constitutional rights. These remain allegations; the appeal concerned delay in the civil cases, not whether the alleged conduct occurred.
A criminal prosecution followed a complaint to the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission. The first trial collapsed in October 2010, and a jury acquitted the accused Gardaí after a retrial in July 2011. The appeal court noted that key witnesses had already given evidence in those trials and that transcripts or statements from the criminal proceedings could help reduce memory-related prejudice in a later civil trial.
The civil cases stalled after a discovery request in March 2012. The Chief State Solicitor’s Office said in May that year that the requested materials were held by GSOC and the Director of Public Prosecutions. The plaintiffs took no further steps before the defendants applied in November 2015 to strike out the proceedings. The High Court granted that application in April 2016, reasoning that the delay was close to ten years from the alleged incident.
The Court of Appeal said the relevant period from the alleged incident to the strike-out motion was still less than eight years, and distinguished cases involving longer or repeated delays. It also noted that one plaintiff had been in prison until December 2011 and that the other was recovering from heroin addiction and had experienced depression. The court said these circumstances did not excuse the delay on their own, but were part of the overall balance.
The court ordered the plaintiffs to serve notice of intention to proceed within two weeks of the order being perfected. After the one-month period under the court rules, they must issue and serve a motion seeking directions for an early trial and case management. The court warned that further avoidable delay could lead to a new dismissal motion.