Former Rehab boss Kerins submits legal costs of €2.1 million over PAC case
By Gráinne Ní Aodha, PA
Former Rehab boss Angela Kerins has submitted legal costs worth €2.1 million arising from a case that she took against a parliamentary committee.
The costs, relating to a High Court case which found in her favour in 2019, are being examined by an accountant, a committee heard on Thursday.
Legal costs relating to two other related matters in the courts are yet to be submitted to the Houses of the Oireachtas.
The former chief executive of the rehabilitation organisation was questioned by members of a committee in 2014.
She subsequently took legal action against the Committee of Public Accounts, arguing that the line of questioning was inappropriate.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the Public Accounts Committee acted outside of its terms of reference in its questioning of Ms Kerins.
At the Public Accounts Committee on Tuesday, Independent Galway TD Catherine Connolly asked about the outstanding legal fees relating to Ms Kerins’ case.
“The account for 2024 includes, I think, the last tranche of the payment to our own legal team. So I think the total figure is €725,000,” the clerk of the Dáil, Peter Finnegan, said.
“All of the in-house solicitors' work was done by the OPLA, so that’s why the bill came in at 725 (thousand euro). Had we gone outside, certainly it would be considerably higher.
“The case is obviously finished now, and there was three sets of proceedings that there was costs awarded.
“So the first set of proceedings was the original High Court case where the court awarded Ms Kerins her full costs.
“So we have in a bill from Ms Kerins from the legal team for that, and that’s been worked through by a legal cost accountant on our behalf.
“The amount is 2.1 million, and that’s for her solicitors’ fees and her barristers’ fees.”
He said they have yet to receive her fees from the second High Court action or the Supreme Court hearing.
Mellissa English SC, the chief parliamentary legal adviser assistant secretary, said she did not want to speculate on how much more those cases would add to the cost.
“I think that’s very difficult to estimate, I wouldn’t like to speculate,” she told the committee on Thursday.
“Module Two was an awful lot shorter. It was just a High Court discovery aspect and a discovery hearing in the Supreme Court. So it’s a much shorter module because, as we all know, her case ended when the Supreme Court issued its decision in June 2024 that basically her claim for damages is not stateable because it is a collateral attack on members’ utterances, which are protected by the Constitution, and therefore no claim for damages is sustainable.”
Ms Connolly said “lessons were learned all around” by the Public Accounts committee and others after the case.