TDs go to court to claw back €1m legal costs in Kerins’s case
A GROUP of TDs will today ask the Supreme Court to overturn a decision to spare Angela Kerins the bulk of a €1million legal bill for her failed attempt to sue a Dáil committee.
The High Court decision, given in April after the former €240,000-ayear Rehab charity chief lost her case for damages, left taxpayers facing a bill of about €900,000.
The 58-year-old’s complaints against the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee were outweighed by the absolute need for freedom of speech in parliament, the High Court ruled in January. However, in April, the court landed the TDs with twothirds of Ms Kerins’s own costs of taking the case, along with the PAC’s own costs of defending it. In reality, that bill – of at least €750,000 – would be paid by the taxpayerfunded Houses of the Oireachtas Commission on behalf of the TDs.
Ms Kerins was also spared the State and the Attorney General’s costs of defending the case – meaning a further €100,000 bill for taxpayers. The whole costs of a daily transcript for her ten-day case – estimated at €50,000 or more – were also landed on taxpayers.
No money has yet been taken from the public purse because the TDs who made up the PAC in 2014 – including John McGuinness, Shane Ross, Mary Lou McDonald and Simon Harris – are appealing against the decision.
In her failed lawsuit, Ms Kerins, 58, claimed that a 2014 Dáil committee questioning about her pay and perks pushed her to the brink of suicide. She also claimed she was ‘bullied’ by TDs with ‘outrageous’ questions. But Judges Peter Kelly, Isobel Kennedy and Séamus Noonan ruled that ‘the effective functioning of parliament would be impaired’ if TDs were restricted in what they could say in the Dáil.
Despite losing, Ms Kerins had asked the court to hold 13 TDs liable for all the costs because her case was ‘exceptional’.
Ms Kerins quit Rehab in April 2014 before launching her personalinjury lawsuit for damages that she lost this year. Ms Kerins is taking her own Supreme Court appeal against that defeat.
This morning in the Supreme Court, Judge Elizabeth Dunne is due to sit to hear the first stage of both the TDs’ costs appeal and Ms Kerins’s own appeal. A full Supreme Court hearing of both appeals before a panel of judges is expected to take place in 2018.