Ulster Bank Ireland DAC v O'Rourke
| Jurisdiction | Ireland |
| Court | Supreme Court |
| Judge | O'Donnell J.,MacMenamin J.,Finlay Geoghegan J. |
| Judgment Date | 07 March 2019 |
| Neutral Citation | [2019] IESCDET 64 |
| Date | 07 March 2019 |
[2019] IESCDET 64
THE SUPREME COURT
DETERMINATION
O'Donnell J.
MacMenamin J.
Finlay Geoghegan J.
AND
RESULT: The Court does not grant leave to the First Named Defendant / Applicant to appeal to this Court from the Court of Appeal
| COURT: Court of Appeal |
| DATE OF JUDGMENT OR RULING: 25 th January, 2019 |
| DATE OF ORDER: 25 th January, 2019 |
| DATE OF PERFECTION OF ORDER: 28 th January, 2019 |
| THE APPLICATION FOR LEAVE TO APPEAL WAS MADE ON 12 th February, 2019 AND WAS IN TIME. |
This is an application for leave brought on behalf of the first defendant in the original High Court proceedings, Mr. Brendan O'Rourke, who, because of the coincidence of names in the related equity proceedings, will be referred to as the applicant. He seeks leave to appeal against the decision of the Court of Appeal (Irvine J.) of 25 January 2019 to refuse a stay on an order of the High Court (Hanlon J.) made on 5 December 2018 (whereby the court granted an interlocutory injunction restraining the defendants from trespassing on lands and premises known as Furness Hall, Naas, in the County of Kildare), pending the determination of the appeal against that order.
The general principles applied by this court in determining whether to grant or refuse leave to appeal are well known and are fully addressed in both a determination issued by a panel consisting of all of the members of this court in B.S. v. Director of Public Prosecutions [2017] IESCDET 134, (Unreported, Supreme Court, 6 December 2017), and in a unanimous judgment of a full court delivered by O'Donnell J. in Quinn Insurance Ltd. v. Price water house Coopers [2017] IESC 73, [2017] 3 I.R. 812.
The application for leave filed and the respondent's notice are published along with this determination (subject only to any redaction required by law). It is therefore unnecessary to set out the position of the parties in any detail.
The background to the proceedings is extremely complicated. Furthermore, while much of the background dispute was considered in the earlier equity proceedings between the applicant and his former wife and parents-in-law, this case is concerned with ancillary proceedings, and little of the background dispute is set out in these proceedings and application for leave to appeal. What follows, therefore, does not purport to be a complete, definitive, or fully accurate account of the background disputes, but simply sets out what appears to the position as advanced in the application for a stay pending appeal to the Court of Appeal, which is the decision which the applicant seeks to appeal to this court. It appears that Ulster Bank Ireland DAC (‘the bank’), the plaintiff herein and the respondent to the appeal, was the mortgagee of the property at Furness Hall, the mortgagors being, it appears, the parents of the former wife of the applicant, who were trustees under a family trust, and who did not resist the bank's claim to possession pursuant to the mortgage. The applicant and his former wife were divorced in 2017. The applicant was not named as a beneficiary of the trust. There were three sets of proceedings in the High Court. The first and main proceedings were described as equity proceedings in which the applicant sought to contend that he had an interest in the premises by reason of representations he contended had been made to him by his former father-in-law, Mr. Dermot of Rourke, which were supported by expenditure he contended he had made on the property on faith of the said representations. There were also proceedings between the applicant and his former wife. The present proceedings were the third set of proceedings, which, in effect, sought possession of the property. As set out above, the trustees and mortgagors of the property had surrendered possession to the bank on the basis that there were considerable sums outstanding to the bank. The applicant's contention that he was entitled to remain in possession and resist the bank's claim was to a large extent dependent on the success of the...
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O'Rourke v O'Rourke
...to this Court from the Court of Appeal. It did so for the reasons set out in its determination, Ulster Bank Ireland DAC v. O'Rourke [2019] IESCDET 64, which included the fact that the Court was not satisfied that the decision of the Court of Appeal raised any issue of general public importa......