A G v The Director of Public Prosecutions (Approved)

This is an application to revisit a final judgment and order of the Court of Appeal by which an application to extend the time for the filing of an appeal against a judgment and order of the High Court was refused.

The applicant is a seasoned and determined litigant in person. The application is in form an application pursuant to Court of Appeal Practice Direction CA 14 - "Applications to vary or rescind a final Judgment or Order made by the Court of Appeal" – in the sense that it comprises a draft notice of motion, affidavit not exceeding 2,000 words, and short legal submission, not exceeding 1,000 words, but it does not engage with the fundamental basis of the exceptional jurisdiction to revisit a final judgment of an appellate court first identified in In re Greendale Developments Ltd. (No. 3) [2000] 2 I.R. 514 in circumstances in which, through no fault on the applicant's part, the order or judgment made operates both to deny the applicant justice and clearly to breach the applicant's constitutional rights. Nor does it engage with the requirement that the intending applicant must show cogent and substantive grounds which are objectively sufficient to enable the Court to determine that a hearing of a review application on the merits is justified.

The background to this application is summarised in the judgment of Burns J. (with which Faherty and Allen JJ. agreed) delivered on 23 September 2025. ( [2025] IECA 190 )

The applicant stands charged before the District Court with a number of public order offences arising out of events which occurred on 25 August 2019 when the Gardaí were called to investigate the circumstances in which he had left his not quite three-year-old child asleep in his unattended car in a shopping centre car park and gone shopping with his four and a half year old child.

On 19 January 2023 the applicant applied to the District Court for an anonymisation order - that it to say, an order anonymising him - on the basis that he might wish to call one or other or both of his children as witnesses. That application was refused. On 16 September 2024 the High Court (Barr J.) ( [2024] IEHC 544 ) refused an application for certiorari by way of judicial review of the order of the District Court. The High Court order was perfected on 12 November 2024 and the time for lodging an appeal expired on 10 December 2025.

By notice of motion issued on 24 March 2025 the applicant applied to this Court for an extension of time to appeal. When the motion came into the list for hearing on 15 July 2025 the applicant sought the recusal of two of the members of the panel. In separate ex tempore judgments Faherty and Allen JJ. declined to recuse themselves and the motion was heard. For the reasons given in writing on 23 September 2025, that application was refused. This Court found that the applicant had not explained his failure to appeal within the time allowed or his subsequent long delay in filing his application for an extension of time. It also found that the applicant had failed to identify any arguable ground of appeal.

The judgment of 23 September 2025 was delivered electronically and the matter was listed for 9:30 a.m. on 15 October 2025 to deal with the question of costs. At 8:54 a.m. on the morning of the costs hearing the applicant e-mailed the Court of Appeal office (copying the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions). He thanked the panel for the quality of the judgment which, he acknowledged, had addressed the core elements of his submissions. However - he said - it seemed that he had put insufficient emphasis on his right to prepare his defence under EU law and he asked the Court to reverse its decision before the final order was perfected. When the Court sat on 15 October 2025, that application was refused and the Court dealt with the costs of the applicant's unsuccessful motion. There was no mention at that stage of dissatisfaction with the outcome or reasons for the refusal of the recusal applications.

On 19 November 2025 the applicant filed the application the subject of this ruling: which comprised a draft notice of motion, grounding affidavit, and outline written submissions. In his covering e-mail he protested that the Court of Appeal office had been prevented from assigning a return date for his proposed motion by Court of Appeal Practice Direction CA 14, which - he contended - was contrary to the Constitution and EU laws.

The applicant's draft notice of motion lists seven reliefs, the first three of which are - more or less - directed to the refusal of the recusal applications in respect of Faherty and Allen JJ.

None of this is apparent from the papers filed in support of this application but the transcript of the hearing on 15 July 2025 shows that the applicant then sought the recusal of Allen and Faherty JJ. on a number of grounds.

In the case of Allen J., the applicant had asked that he should recuse himself on five grounds. The first three of these grounds arose from in a judgment which Allen J. had written (and with which Faherty and O'Moore JJ. had concurred) on another attempt by the applicant to re-open an appeal which he had lost - Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies [2025] IECA 93. The judgment on the substance of the appeal in 2023 298 Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies [2025] IECA 58 was delivered on 7 March 2025 by Faherty J., with Allen and O'Moore JJ. concurring. The costs of that appeal were dealt with in a judgment of Allen J., with which Faherty and O'Moore JJ. concurred. In that case Allen J. had described a dictum of Ó Dálaigh C.J. in The State (Quinn) v. Ryan [1965] I.R. 70 as "an observation" rather than - as Mr. Gaultier insisted it was - "a doctrine" . That, he suggested, showed incompetence and a lack of integrity. The second ground was that in the same judgment Allen J. had failed to quote all of the passages from the European Court of Human Rights Guide on Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights which had been relied on by the applicant.

The third ground arose from the same judgment. Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies was an appeal against an order of the High Court extending the time to issue execution on foot of a costs order. One of Mr. Gaultier's arguments in that case was that his consent to the extension of time had not been sought. Allen J. had observed that any letter seeking consent would not only have been a waste of time but would have precipitated an attempted collateral challenge to the validity of the previous orders in that long running saga. This - the applicant claimed - was not only insulting but failed to recognise his right to apply to set aside decisions.

The fourth ground was that Allen J. had recently refused an application by Mr. Gaultier to review and revisit another judgment, otherwise than in accordance with Practice Direction CA 14. And the fifth ground was that Allen J. had concurred with the conclusion of McDonald J. on the related appeal in A.G. v. A Judge of the District Court [2025] IECA 129 that in applying for District Court summonses against the prosecuting Gardaí, Mr. Gaultier did not have a genuine desire to invoke the criminal process.

In the case of Faherty J., the recusal application was difficult to follow. The judgment on the substance of the appeal in 2023 298 Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies [2025] IECA 58 was delivered by Faherty J., with Allen and O'Moore JJ. concurring. The judgment in relation to the costs of that appeal ([2025] IECA 93) was delivered by Allen J., with Faherty and O'Moore JJ. concurring. That second judgment, besides dealing with the question of costs, also addressed Mr. Gaultier's attempt to persuade the Court to reopen the substantive judgment. In asking Faherty J. to recuse herself, Mr. Gaultier submitted that the judgment which she had written in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies [2025] IECA 58 "opened the door for me to apply to get separately to have all the orders of the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court set aside. And, but the second judgment say otherwise, the ruling of the Court says otherwise. So it is totally illogical, there is no impartiality, no clear reasoning, no integrity, which is also a principle of judicial conduct."

The recusal application in respect of Faherty J. appears to have been based partly on a perceived difference between the judgment which she had written and the judgment with which she had agreed but mostly on the ground that Faherty J. had agreed with the judgment of Allen J., to which he took exception.

Applying the well-known principles, Faherty J. declined to recuse herself. There was - she said - no basis for a reasonable apprehension of objective bias.

Allen J. addressed seriatim the arguments advanced by Mr. Gaultier arising out of the costs ruling in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies [2025] IECA 93 finding that each of them, at their height, amounted to suggestions of errors of law which did not justify a judge recusing himself. He explained that the object of CA 14 was to regulate the invocation of the inherent jurisdiction of the Court and was not an impediment but a gateway to that jurisdiction. Allen J. said that the complaint as to his concurrence with the judgment of McDonald J. in A.G. v. A Judge of the District Court was also - at its height - a complaint of error of law which could not justify his recusal.

In his short affidavit grounding this application, Mr. Gaultier first of all repeats a complaint previously made that the judgment of 23 September 2025 was delivered electronically and that this was contrary to the requirement that justice be administered in public. That is simply incorrect. The practice of electronic delivery of judgments - no more than the reading of a summary and subsequent circulation of the full text of the judgment - is not inconsistent with the constitutional requirement that justice be administered in public. Apart from the fact that the submission is wrong in law, it could not possibly meet the threshold for a review of the substance of the judgment.

Secondly, he complains that the Court refused to hear what he describes as his application to reverse the decision of 23 September 2025 made by e-mail sent at 8:54 a.m. on the morning of 15 October 2025, otherwise than by an application made in accordance with CA 14. This, he suggests, was inconsistent with the fact that a panel which included Faherty and Allen JJ. had previously accepted a review application before the order had been perfected in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies [2025] IECA 93. That too, is incorrect. The judgment in [2025] IECA 93 set out the arguments which Mr. Gaultier sought to make in answer to the entirely successful respondent's costs application but the conclusion was that it was not appropriate that he should have sought to reventilate on the costs application the issues which had been comprehensively addressed in the judgment of Faherty J. In other words, the Court did not refuse the application on the merits but refused to entertain it at all.

Thirdly - in his affidavit grounding this application - Mr. Gaultier expressed astonishment that an argument which had been advanced in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies that judgment might be void ab initio had been confirmed by - as he put it - none other than Murray J. in his keynote address on judicial independence at the 2025 EU Bar Association annual conference. He did not elaborate on what precisely Murray J. may have said.

In Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies Mr. Gaultier's main argument – which he then argued was decisive for the outcome of that appeal - was that the High Court costs order on foot of which leave to issue execution had been sought was "void ab initio" . The High Court costs order in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies was made by Dunne J. on 8 March 2013 and affirmed by the Court of Appeal on 23 July 2019. In the meantime the costs had been taxed and a review application to the High Court refused. It is true that in its judgments in 2025 this Court robustly rejected Mr. Gaultier's argument that Barr J. in his judgment of 25 October 2023 - or this Court on appeal - ought to have treated the order of Dunne J. as a nullity but that has nothing to do with the judicial independence of the assigned judges.

At the time of writing, the text of Murray J.'s keynote address to the EU Bar Association is not available, but sight unseen it can have had nothing whatever to do with the execution of the 2013 High Court costs order against Mr. Gaultier; or the manner in which his appeal in 2023 298 Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies was dealt with by this Court, or by any of the assigned judges; or the impartiality of the assigned judges, or any of them.

In his written legal submissions filed on this application the applicant disclaimed any reliance on the inherent jurisdiction of the Court to review or reverse a decision once the order had been perfected, but appealed instead to "the EU precedents defining the criteria of independence and impartiality (since 2018, the Portuguese Judge v. Tribunal of Contas) pursuant to Article 19.1 TEU." EU law, he submits, is based on the rule of law and the rule of law requires that the rules and laws be applied consistently. Any inconsistency in the application of the law, he submits, would be inconsistent with the rule of law. This, he says, is consistent with the Irish principles set out by Clarke J. in Hughes v. Worldport Communications Inc. [2005] IEHC 189 to follow the decision of another judge of the same court, as recently referred to by Barr J. in Friedman v. Residential Tenancies Board [2025] IEHC 477 .

The "variation in the applicability of" Practice Direction CA 14, which was made on 5 December 2024, is said to be "between the 11.4.2025 and the 15.10.2025 is deemed illegal and void ab initio . " While the applicant appeals to the recent - unidentified - decisions of the CJEU, the address of Murray J. to the EU Bar Association, and the Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct, he does not say clearly what these are and he does not identify what difference he perceives between anything that has been said by the CJEU, on the one hand, and the Irish courts, on the other, as to judicial independence.

According to the grounding affidavit, the perceived inconsistency in the application of CA 14 is that "Faherty J. and Allen J., members of the panel of this Court in the herein proceedings (after they both refused [his] application for their respective recusal) had accepted such an application to review/revisit/reverse a decision before the order is perfected without any reliance on the practice direction CA 14 on 11.4.2025, as attested by Allen J.'s decision on 6.5.2025 in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies [2025] IECA 93, paragraph 12."

In the first place, the chronology is wrong. The recusal applications were made on 15 July 2025 in 2025 66 Gaultier v. The Director of Public Prosecutions . The judgment of Allen J. in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies was - as the applicant submits - delivered on 6 May 2025. Accordingly, whatever was done or not done on 11 April 2025 predated the recusal applications. By the same token, whatever was done or not done on 15 October 2025 was done or not done after the recusal applications. It follows that any inconsistency or perceived inconsistency between what was done or not done on 11 April 2025 and 15 October 2025 cannot have had any bearing on the recusal applications.

The argument which the appellant would now make appears to be that because the Court reviewed its final judgment in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies otherwise than in accordance with CA 14, it cannot apply the practice direction to this application.

The applicant is mistaken in his understanding of the judgment of Allen J. at [2025] IECA 93. As is clear from para. 2 of that judgment, the judgment on the substance of the appeal had been delivered on 7 March 2025. At para. 117 the Court noted that the Registrar of Companies was presumptively entitled to an order for the costs of the appeal but indicated that should either party wish to contend for any other costs order, a short costs hearing would be convened. The applicant duly notified the office that he wished to contend for a different costs order and a hearing was scheduled for 11 April 2025.

The applicant's proposition that the Court then entertained an application to review its substantive judgment otherwise than in accordance with CA 14 is based on para. 12 of the judgment of Allen J. where he said:-

What was said as to those arguments, in the immediately following paragraph, was that:-

The judgment at [2025] IECA 93 then identified the arguments which Mr. Gaultier sought to advance in opposition to the Registrar's costs application before concluding, at para. 26, that:-

Contrary to the applicant's professed belief, the substantive judgment in Gaultier v. The Registrar of Companies was not reviewed otherwise than in accordance with CA 14. No less to the point, any difference in the approach taken by the Court to the applications on 11 April 2025 and 15 October 2025 had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the recusal applications on 15 July 2025. And in any event, if, for the sake of argument, there had been any inconsistency, it would have amounted at its height to an error of law: which could not have warranted recusal in a later case.

The Court considers that Mr. Gaultier's recusal application on 15 July 2025 in respect of Allen J. abundantly justified the observation in the judgment of Allen J. of 6 May 2025 that any warning that might have been given to him in 2022 of an intended application for liberty to issue execution on foot of the costs order of the High Court of 8 March 2013 would have precipitated an attempted collateral challenge to the validity of the various orders of the High Court, this Court, and the Supreme Court in the intervening nine years: which would have been an abuse of process.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Still more dangerous is the applicant's acknowledged reliance on "the assistance of AI."

Insofar as the premise of the applicant's application is an entitlement to a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal, the Court unreservedly agrees. Insofar as the applicant would submit that the inherent jurisdiction to review a final judgment or order is potentially engaged by a failure to ensure a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal, the Court unreservedly agrees.

However, the applicant has failed to identify any conceivable basis for any reasonable apprehension that he did not have a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal, still less cogent and substantive grounds which are objectively sufficient to enable the Court to determine that a hearing of a review application on the merits is justified.

Accordingly, the application is refused.