A core time limit of two years for the bringing a civil action in the courts has been proposed by the Law Reform Commission in its latest report.
The proposal applies to legal action where a person or institution seeks the enforcement of a contract or damages arising from negligence. If the action is initiated outside of the time limit, it is “statute-barred” and the defendant has a total defence, irrespective of the merits of the case.
The report proposes a new Limitations Bill to replace the 1957 Statute of Limitations, which allowed for different time limits in different circumstances. The most common cases this applied to involved contracts, debt and personal injuries.
The different time limits gave rise to “satellite actions” in the courts, where the plaintiff and defendant argued as to whether limitation periods of three or six years applied in relation to certain claims, according to the LRC. It described the 1957 Act as “unnecessarily complex” and in need of fundamental reform.
As well as a two-year time limit for most actions, the commission proposes a second “long stop” limitation period of 15 years for a limited range of legal actions, to allow for injuries or damages which emerge long after the event giving rise to them occurred. This would apply to structural damage in buildings, for example, or diseases like those caused by asbestos.
The basic limitation period of two years should run from when the plaintiff knew, or ought to have known, the injury, loss or damage occurred and was attributable to the defendant, whom he or she could identify, and that it warranted legal proceedings.
It provides for “constructive knowledge”, that is, where a person should have known of the injury and the person or body allegedly responsible from information readily available to him or her.
The ultimate limitation period of 15 years should run from when the act complained of took place, but where the consequences of that act took more than two years to emerge, according to the report.
In exceptional circumstances, this limit should be extendable by the courts, but the court must take a number of specific conditions into account in allowing for an extension.
The kind of cases where this might arise would include cases of child sex abuse, where the victim was a minor at the time and, due to this and the trauma of the abuse, unable to bring an action for damages within 15 years of it taking place. It would also include cases where the victim of injury lacked the legal capacity to take action.