The High Court has ordered Mars Capital Ireland No. 2 DAC to pay a personal insolvency practitioner’s party-and-party costs for an appeal concerning when an application under section 115A of the Personal Insolvency Act was made. The order excludes the practitioner’s costs for written submissions, which were filed late.
The costs ruling followed a separate judgment delivered on 11 February 2019. In that judgment, the court ruled for the practitioner on a preliminary legal issue: an application lodged in the Circuit Court Office within the statutory 14-day period had been made in time, even though it was served on statutory notice parties after that period expired.
The Circuit Court had previously accepted Mars’s argument that the application was out of time and dismissed it. The practitioner appealed. After the High Court’s ruling on the timing issue, the court heard submissions on costs on 25 February.
Mars argued that the issue affected many similar cases and the appeal had effectively served as a test case, so each side should bear its own costs. It also noted that it had not sought costs in the Circuit Court. The practitioner argued that the ordinary rule should apply: costs generally follow the outcome. The practitioner also said that public funding for legal costs did not justify a different approach.
Mr Justice Denis McDonald rejected the argument that the test-case circumstances warranted departing from the ordinary costs rule. He said Mars had pursued a legal argument intended to defeat the section 115A application, and found no relevant parallel with an earlier case in which the court had made no order for costs. He ordered Mars to pay the practitioner’s costs of the appeal insofar as it concerned the section 115A(2) issue.
The judge separately addressed the practitioner’s written submissions, which had been delivered one week before the appeal hearing, outside the court’s timetable. He said the late filing could have jeopardised the hearing and caused further delay to other appeals. Mars’s lawyers had instead prepared submissions in time for the hearing to proceed, avoiding an adjournment.
As a result, the court disallowed the practitioner’s costs for those written submissions. It made no further reduction to the costs order. The judgment dealt with costs only; the underlying timing issue had been decided in the earlier 11 February judgment.