Denis O’Brien has been ordered to pay all the legal costs for his failed High Court action over remarks made in the Dáil about his banking details.
The businessman applied for at least some of the bill to be picked up by other parties because of the novelty of the case and the legal issues that arose.
The estimated cost is €1m. By disclosing his dealings with the IBRC in the Dáil in May and June of 2015, Denis O’Brien claimed Deputies Catherine Murphy and Pearse Doherty effectively “unravelled” a court imposed reporting restriction he’d been temporarily granted against RTÉ.
Ms. Justice Una Ní Raifeartaigh agreed and accepted he’d been damaged, but decided the court couldn’t intervene, not even to assess that damage, because they were protected by parliamentary privilege.
In any litigation, ‘costs follow the event’, which means the loser pays, but the court has the discretion to depart from that rule in “exceptional circumstances”.
Mr. O’Brien’s counsel urged the court to do so for a number of reasons. He claimed this was a “constitutional case of importance and particular novelty”. He said there had been no previous case where a citizen with a court order complained that what was said in the Dáil rendered that order pointless.
He said it was brought in the interests of other citizens and not just his own. A point Mr. O’Brien made while giving evidence during his seven-day hearing and one noted by Ms. Justice Ní Raifeartaigh in her judgement today. However, she said it didn’t advance his case for costs.
She said she’d taken into account Mr. O’Brien’s claim that he would have taken legal action even if the Dáil Committee on Procedures and Privileges upheld his complaint, but she said she’d put that factor to one side.
She said there was also no issue of the losing party suffering hardship when considering costs.
She said there was some degree of novelty in the core issues raised, but she decided it wasn’t enough to depart from the normal rule in relation to costs.
Mr. O’Brien will now have to pay his own fees as well as those of the legal teams acting for the clerk of the Dáil, the Dáil Committee on Procedures and Privileges and the State – an estimated bill of €1million.
