A former Dublin lord mayor has lost a High Court challenge against the State's Covid-19 regulations after he and three others were charged with breaching the restrictions more than four years ago.
Nial Ring, an accountant and independent councillor for the north inner city, his two sons, Stephen and Darragh, and his 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 the owner of the pub, were charged with breaching the regulations by allegedly having held or participated in an event, while all four were charged with having left their respective places of residence without reasonable excuse.
During the Covid lockdown in place at the time, a person could not travel more than 2km from their home for exercise unless it was for an essential purpose. All four 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.
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In a judgement 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, the statutory instruments 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.
Given the "remarkable, unprecedented, unparalleled configuration of an entirely unpredictable pandemic event", together with the difficulty of forming a government, the laying of the regulation before the Seanad, on October 16th, 2020, was "soon as may be after it was made" in the circumstances, notwithstanding that the provision was revoked twenty days or so before that, he said.
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", he said.
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 said.
Mr Ring served as lord mayor of Dublin from June 2018 to July 2019.
The judge said he had carried out an analysis of the arguments, and he believed there was no abdication on the part of the Oireachtas, that there are many safeguards, and it was clear that both houses of the Oireachtas had in their contemplation the exact type of regulations as they came into being, by reference to the primary legislation
He found that the safeguards which are contained in the legislation were appropriate and therefore the legislation and regulations were constitutional.
