Case notes - G.E. v Commissioner of An Garda Síochána & Others: Sea Changes Rejected and an Age-Old Tort Reassessed

• Author: Sam Walsh
• Pages: pp 140 - 150
• Published date: 12 July 2022
• Date: 12 July 2022

140

G.E. v Commissioner of An Garda Síochána &

Others: Sea Changes Rejected and an Age-Old

Tort Reassessed

SAM WALSH*

I. Introduction

It is a testament to the complexity and uidity of the common law that ‘a novel

and important issue’1 can still arise in a cause of action ‘referenced in the texts

and yearbooks since the middle of the thirteenth century’.2 In the case of G.E. v

Commissioner of An Garda Síochána & others (‘G.E.’),3 the cause of action therein

was the age-old tort of false imprisonment, an intentional and trespassory tort

which is actionable per se, and the novel issue was the assertion made by the

appellants that:

where a plainti establishes that he or she has been unlawfully conned, a

defendant will defeat any consequent claim for compensatory damages if it

can be shown that had the plainti not been unlawfully detained he or she

could and would have been lawfully detained.4

e law of damages for the tort of false imprisonment has been subject to signicant

reconsideration in the UK. In 2011, the UK Supreme Court in R (WL (Congo))

v Secretary of State for the Home Department (‘Lumba’)5 held that compensatory

damages would not be awarded if it could be shown that a person would have been

lawfully detained in any event, a ruling which formed the basis of the appellants’

submission above. is was subsequently applied in 2018 by the UK Court of

Appeal in Parker v Chief Constable of Essex Police (‘Parker’).6

In reaching his conclusions, Murray J, on behalf of the Court of Appeal, weighed

the appellants’ submissions, based largely on Lumba and its interpretation in Parker,

against the history of false imprisonment in Irish case law and its interaction with

the so-called ‘compensatory principle’ central to the law of torts.

* Sam Walsh is a student of Law and French at Trinity College Dublin. Sam would like to thank his

parents for their support. Any views or opinions expressed in this article are the personal views and

opinions of the author.

1 G.E. v Commissioner of An Garda Síochána & Others [2021] IECA 113 (G.E.) [1] (Murray J).

2 ibid [70].

3 ibid.

4 ibid [1].

5 R (WL (Congo)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] UKSC 12.

6 Parker v e Chief Constable of Essex Police [2018] EWCA Civ 2788, [2019] 1 WLR 2238.