Background
Victoria Polyakova, a self-represented litigant, pursued two separate defamation actions arising from the same underlying events. The first, brought in the Dublin Circuit Court against her insurer AXA, concerned AXA’s 2019 refusal to renew her car insurance and a subsequent communication to a broker that she had failed to disclose “relevant facts.” That claim was dismissed in July 2021 on grounds that included insufficient evidence of defamation and the availability of qualified privilege. The second action was brought against City Financial Marketing Group Limited (CFM), the insurance broker, initially in Athlone District Court and later pursued on de novo appeal before the Midland Circuit Court. CFM moved to dismiss on the ground, among others, that the contract had been concluded in Dublin, where CFM had its principal place of business, and therefore the Midland Circuit lacked jurisdiction. The Circuit Court Judge dismissed the claim on that single jurisdictional ground in July 2025.
Polyakova applied for leave to seek judicial review of the Circuit Court’s 2025 decision. She argued that the Judge acted with bias and bad faith, and that the jurisdictional dismissal was irreconcilable with the earlier 2021 Dublin Circuit Court ruling, which she characterised as having found that AXA and CFM were separate legal entities. She contended that the 2025 Judge was therefore bound by that alleged finding on corporate identity. The leave application was adjourned on multiple occasions to allow the applicant to file the pleadings and submissions from both prior proceedings, and the court ultimately listened to the DAR recording of the 2025 Circuit Court ruling.
Justice Gearty reviewed the full record of both sets of proceedings before determining the leave application on 18 May 2026, delivering judgment on 12 June 2026.
The Court’s Holding
Leave to apply for judicial review was refused on all grounds. The court found that the applicant could not establish an arguable case on any of the three bases advanced. First, there is no legal principle requiring the High Court to intervene in Circuit or District Court decisions to ensure consistency between cases involving different parties, even where the underlying facts are related. Any risk of inconsistency from suing defendants separately is ordinarily avoided by joining all relevant parties in a single set of proceedings, but the failure to do so does not give rise to a reviewable error. Second, reviewing the actual record of both prior proceedings, the court found no evidence that the 2021 Dublin Circuit Court had made any finding on the separate corporate identity of AXA and CFM — the dismissal had proceeded on defamation and qualified privilege grounds only — and accordingly there was no binding determination that could have been contradicted by the 2025 ruling.
On bias and bad faith, the court applied the test confirmed by the Supreme Court in Kelly v. UCD [2025] IESC 6: whether a reasonable and informed onlooker would have a reasonable apprehension that the judge could not give the matter an impartial hearing by reference only to the facts and law. The court found no evidence of any prior connection, financial interest, or pre-judgment on the part of the Circuit Court Judge. The Judge’s comments during the hearing — noting that the applicant could not “pick different bits” from inconsistent transcripts and describing her affidavits as voluminous — did not come close to establishing bias. Equally, the claim of bad faith (mala fides) requires evidence of dishonesty, and none was present; the Judge simply decided against the applicant on the admissible evidence.
The court also rejected the applicant’s attempt to characterise the Judge’s failure to rule on the separate-entity argument as improper. The only defendant before the Circuit Court was CFM, and the Judge was entitled — indeed required — to decide the motion on the evidence before her, namely CFM’s principal place of business in Dublin, without revisiting issues argued in earlier proceedings against a different party.
Key Takeaways
- There is no remedy by way of judicial review to enforce consistency between Circuit or District Court decisions in separate proceedings involving different parties, even when the underlying facts overlap.
- A litigant who sues defendants sequentially rather than joining them in one action bears the risk that different arguments may yield different results; the remedy lies in proper joinder of parties at the outset, not in subsequent collateral challenge.
- The threshold for establishing bias requires objective evidence of a reasonable apprehension of partiality; disagreement with a judge’s conclusions, or a judge’s adverse comments on a litigant’s evidence or presentation, does not meet that threshold.
- Bad faith (mala fides) as a ground of judicial review requires evidence of dishonesty or a corrupt state of mind — mere unfavourable rulings or failure to address every argument raised cannot support such a claim.
- In a de novo Circuit Court appeal, the Circuit Court’s findings stand alone and do not incorporate or endorse any finding of the District Court below.
Why It Matters
This decision provides a clear restatement of the limits of judicial review as a mechanism for re-litigating unfavourable outcomes. It confirms that the High Court will not use Order 84 to police substantive consistency across unrelated proceedings in the lower courts, and that serial litigants cannot use a later judicial review application as a vehicle to raise arguments — including alleged contradictions with prior rulings — that could and should have been addressed through proper joinder of parties or by appeal. The judgment usefully synthesises the principles from Henderson v. Henderson, A.A. v. The Medical Council, and Ambrose v. Shevlin in the context of sequential multi-defendant litigation.
The case also offers a concise synthesis of the current Irish law on bias and bad faith following the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Kelly v. UCD, reinforcing that strong, objective evidence of partiality — not mere dissatisfaction with a result — is required before the High Court will disturb a lower court ruling on those grounds. Practitioners advising plaintiffs with claims against multiple related defendants should note the court’s emphasis on the importance of joining all relevant parties from the outset to avoid jurisdictional and consistency risks across serial proceedings.