Former lord mayor of Dublin Nial Ring loses High Court challenge to Covid-19 regulations

A former lord mayor of Dublin, who is seeking to be reelected to the city council next week, has lost a High Court challenge to the Covid-19 regulations after he and three others were charged with breaching them more than four years ago.

Nial Ring, an accountant and independent councillor for the north inner city; his sons, Stephen, an accountant, and Darragh, a scientist; along with the councillor’s business partner Liam McGrattan, were charged after they were found by gardaí upstairs in the Ref pub in Ballybough at around 11pm on April 17th, 2020.

Nial Ring and Mr McGrattan, who was also the owner of the pub, were charged with breaching the regulations by allegedly having held or participated in an event. All four were charged with having left their respective places of residence without reasonable excuse.

Under the pandemic regulations at the time, a person could not travel more than 2km from home unless it was for an essential purpose. All four men live in Clontarf.

They were charged before the District Court where they denied the charges. They then brought a High Court challenge against the Minister for Health and the State seeking a declaration that the regulations were invalid as they had not been enacted properly. The defendants opposed the challenge.

In a judgment on Friday, Mr Justice David Nolan said all grounds of the challenge must fail. The judge said at issue from the plaintiffs’ view was the effectiveness of the legislation (giving rise to the regulations) in the context that the Seanad was not sitting.

There had been a general election in February 2020 and a new government had yet to be formed.

The judge said this “gave rise to a unique set of circumstances whereby the Dáil was not in a position to elect a Taoiseach and thereby not in a position to comply with the constitutional requirement of completing the composition of the Seanad”.

As a result, he said, the statutory instruments making the regulations did not appear on the order paper of the Seanad, prior to their enforceability. Therefore, the plaintiffs argued, the regulations did not have adequate oversight from the legislative branch of the State.

In circumstances where criminal liability attached to certain matters specified by the Minister, the regulations themselves constituted an impermissible delegation of legislative function, they claimed.

The judge said the plaintiffs conceded as to when the legislation was laid before both houses but the issue of the effectiveness of the legislation in the context of the Seanad not sitting was very much part of their case.

He said they argued that the regulations did not have adequate oversight from the legislative branch of the State and, in circumstances where criminal liability attached to certain matters, the regulations themselves constituted an impermissible delegation of legislative function.

It was clearly the intention of both Houses of the Oireachtas that this legislation should be put in place, for the proper and indeed constitutionally appropriate step of vindicating lives, he said. It was not done “on some party political whim, or some attempted power grab, carried out by an unconscionable dictatorship”.

For the plaintiffs to come to court to say, on this particular point, that the legislation and more particularly the regulations, were “somehow invalid due to an alleged technicality seems to me to be wrong”.

He also said it cannot go without commenting that Nial Ring had been “the first citizen of the capital city of the State”. He served as lord mayor from June 2018 to July 2019.

He found that the safeguards contained in the legislation were appropriate and therefore the legislation and regulations were constitutional.