High Court: Woman fails to establish negligence in sale of late mother’s home

About this case:

• Judgment:
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The Court heard that in the end, Mr Mellon did not actually submit a tender – Justice Humphreys said that it was likely that this was because he did not in fact have the funds immediately available. Thus, Justice Humphreys stated that “it was reasonable for the administrators and their advisers to have suspected that to be the case and to not have accepted his offer on that basis”.

Ultimately, the sale was concluded at €16.1m, the vendors having negotiated up with the successful tenderers.

High Court Proceedings

In order to succeed, Ms Doyle needed to establish:

In relation to the first question, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys stated that “an unusual issue arose in relation to the relationship of the plaintiff to the White family”.

The Court heard that Ms Doyle exhibited symptoms of epilepsy from around 1974 (aged 17); suffered a first grand mal seizure in 1991; and that in 2000 she had treatment in Beaumont Hospital which involved the removal of a portion of her brain in the frontal lobe. Justice Humphreys stated that at some point, she “developed the clearly delusional belief that she was not biological child”, adopting the alias of “Aideen Doyle” rather than her given name of Clodagh White.

As such, Ms Doyle’s statement of claim originally pleaded only that she was treated as a daughter of the deceased, rather than that she actually was a daughter – however in order to pursue the claim properly, Ms Doyle amended the statement of claim to positively plead her status as a daughter of the deceased.

Justice Humphreys said that unless she was such a daughter, her claim must be dismissed on this basis alone.

In this regard, Justice Humphreys stated that “but for the fact that the defendants did not appear to wish to take this particular point against her, I would have dismissed the action on that ground alone”.

Fiduciary duty

Personal representatives have a number of fiduciary duties to the beneficiaries (In re Tebbs 1 WLR 92, Shaughnessy v. Shaughnessy IEHC 303 (Unreported) including:

Ms Doyle’s evidence was rejected “as not only frequently evasive and unreliable but unfortunately deluded in many respects”.

Describing her allegations as “the work of a fantasist”, Jusitce Humphreys was satisfied that there was no breach of duty by the administrators as alleged or at all.

Section 50 of the Succession Act

Justice Humphreys explained that “personal representatives must act in good faith and should not follow the majority wishes if they consider that to do so would be negligent”, but “if they incorrectly but in good faith think that following the majority view would not be negligent, the mandate to comply with the majority as set out in s. 50” provides “an implicit protection for the personal representatives unless the negligence is gross”.

Accordingly, even if there was some form of breach of duty by the administrators, Justice Humphreys was satisfied that “it was not so manifestly unreasonable as to oust the protection of s. 50. Nor was there any absence of good faith”.

Loss

Finally, Justice Humphreys held that the alleged breaches of duty could not be said to have given rise to loss anyway because Mr Mellon was never closed off from the tendering process.

Conclusion

Justice Humphreys was satisfied that any one of the aforementioned failures “independently would have been fatal to the action”, and that an accumulation of such failures in combination reinforced that result.

Accordingly, Ms Doyle’s action was dismissed.