The High Court has ruled that Mario Cafolla’s 1998 settlement of claims relating to sexual abuse by the late Father Brendan Smyth also settled his later claim against the Bishop of Kilmore. The ruling decided a preliminary issue; it was not a trial of the underlying allegations.
Cafolla’s 2012 proceedings alleged that two meetings in March and April 1975 alerted church officials to abuse by Smyth, but that they failed to take steps to protect children, including Cafolla. He claimed that learning of the meetings and of an interviewee’s identification of him as a possible victim gave rise to a separate cause of action and further injury.
The Bishop of Kilmore argued that the claims concerned the same damage and had already been settled. In 1998, Cafolla accepted £25,000 plus legal costs in full and final settlement of claims arising from his complaints about Smyth. The settlement also said the claims would not be reopened against the named defendants or any third party.
Cafolla argued that the Bishop of Kilmore had not been a party to the Northern Ireland proceedings or settlement, and that neither he nor his legal advisers knew of the 1975 meetings when they settled. He also submitted that the later disclosure caused fresh psychological injury. The judgment records that the second defendant, then a part-time secretary to Bishop Francis McKiernan, was not a party to the preliminary-issue application.
President of the High Court Kearns held that the Bishop of Kilmore was sued in the same institutional capacity as the relevant church authorities in the earlier proceedings. He added that, in any event, the settlement’s wording covered third parties in connection with Cafolla’s complaints.
The court found that the claimed injuries were the same in both sets of proceedings and that the discovery of details about the meetings amounted, at most, to an aggravation of existing damage rather than a new cause of action. It also concluded that newspaper reports had placed information about the meetings in the public domain before the 1998 settlement, so the plaintiff and his advisers were aware, or ought to have been aware, of the material facts.
The court concluded that Cafolla’s claim against the first defendant had been the subject of accord and satisfaction. It said it was unnecessary to deliver separate judgments in related cases brought by Marie Cafolla and Ciara Fusco, and that the same conclusions applied to them. The judgment does not determine the truth of the underlying abuse or negligence allegations.