Order 28 Amendments Refused Where a “New” Pleading Is Prolix, Unpleadable and Prejudicial (Order 19, r. 3)

Case: Mohan v The Revenue Commissioners and Ors (Approved) [2026] IEHC 468

Court: High Court of Ireland  |  Judge: Mr Justice Barry O'Donnell  |  Date: 14 July 2026

1. Introduction

This decision concerns an application by the plaintiff (a farmer and businessman in the broiler poultry sector) for liberty to amend his statement of claim under Order 28 RSC. The defendants were the Revenue Commissioners, Ireland, and the Attorney General.

The proceedings originated in complaints about alleged misuse of VAT arrangements in the poultry sector—particularly the interaction between VAT-registered co-operative societies and the farmer flat-rate scheme under s. 86 of the Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010. The plaintiff alleged that he refused to participate in what he understood to be VAT fraud and suffered serious commercial consequences; he contended the State’s response (especially Revenue’s) caused or contributed to his losses.

The application had to be read against the procedural backdrop of [2025] IEHC 63 (Simons J.), where a strike-out application was found well-founded in principle due to pleading deficiencies (notably in misfeasance in public office), but the court deferred final relief to allow an application to amend.

2. Summary of the Judgment

  • The High Court refused leave to amend.
  • The proposed amended statement of claim (approximately 513 paragraphs, 142 pages, with extensive “appendices” and a large discovery wish-list) was held to be prolix, non-compliant with Order 19, r. 3 RSC, and incapable of being properly pleaded to by the defendants.
  • The court emphasised that it is not the court’s role to “sift” or effectively re-draft an incoherent, sprawling pleading into proper form.
  • Given the refusal of the amendments, and in light of Simons J.’s earlier findings, the court concluded the existing statement of claim should be struck out as failing to disclose a reasonable cause of action / bound to fail.
  • Costs were provisionally indicated in the defendants’ favour, with final orders listed for a further date.

3. Analysis

3.1 The procedural and substantive “real issue” on an amendment application

Order 28 gives a broad discretion to allow amendments “at any stage”, but the discretion is constrained by the requirement that amendments be necessary to determine the issues in controversy. The court treated the amendment application as requiring, at a minimum, compliance with foundational pleading rules—especially Order 19, r. 3 (material facts in summary form; not evidence).

A central practical consideration was litigation manageability and fairness: a pleading that is so vast and narrative-driven that the defendant cannot identify the case to meet is, of itself, a reason to refuse leave (and, if it somehow became the operative pleading, would be vulnerable to strike-out principles).

3.2 Precedents cited and their influence

(a) Amendment principles and “doomed to fail” amendments

The court relied on Stafford v. Rice & Ors [2022] IECA 47, where Collins J. restated the liberal approach to amendments, but also confirmed an important limiting principle:

Where it is manifest that an amended claim is doomed to fail, the amendment should not be permitted; forcing a defendant to plead and defend can itself be prejudicial.

In this case, “doomed to fail” was not assessed by forecasting the ultimate merits after evidence; rather, it was tied to threshold procedural viability: if the proposed amended pleading would plainly be susceptible to strike-out (e.g., for prolixity, incoherence, non-compliance with pleading rules, or prejudicial abuse of process), then it is not an amendment that “could have been pleaded ab initio” in any meaningful sense.

(b) The pleading rule: material facts, not evidence or narrative

The defendants’ core objection was that the proposed pleading breached Order 19, r. 3. The court agreed, referencing established Irish authority on proper pleading discipline:

  • McGee v. O'Reilly [1996] 2 I.R. 229
  • ASI Sugar Limited v. Greencore Group plc (unreported High Court, Finnegan P., 11 February 2003)
  • Begley v. Damesfield Ltd & Ors [2020] IECA 171

These authorities inform the line between (i) a concise statement of material facts defining the dispute and (ii) evidential detail, commentary, argumentative narrative, and sprawling allegations not anchored to pleaded causes of action. The court viewed the plaintiff’s draft as falling decisively into the latter category.

(c) The court is not obliged to “sift” grossly defective pleadings

The court adopted the approach expressed by McGovern J. in Doherty v. Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform [2009] IEHC 246: where scandalous or vexatious pleading is sufficiently gross and extensive, the court is not required to search through it to find a viable claim.

While this case was not framed solely as “scandalous/vexatious”, the principle was deployed in a closely related way: the court would not parse and restructure 142 pages of narrative and appendices in order to rescue a legally coherent, manageable set of claims.

(d) No “iterative” entitlement to repeated re-pleading attempts

The court invoked Butler J.’s observation in Tesco Ireland v. Stateline [2024] IECA 46 that the court is not obliged to conduct an iterative exchange, identifying weaknesses and giving unlimited opportunities to mend a case. That mattered here because the plaintiff had already been given significant latitude after [2025] IEHC 63, including opportunities to obtain representation, provide drafts, and re-present the amendment application.

(e) Misfeasance in public office ingredients (context and continuing deficiency)

The prior strike-out application before Simons J. had crystallised around the plaintiff’s failure to plead the elements of misfeasance in public office, with agreement that the relevant ingredients were set out in:

Although O’Donnell J. refused the amendment primarily due to pleading form (prolixity/incoherence/prejudice), he also recorded that, even after multiple readings, the proposed amendments did not clearly cure the earlier misfeasance pleading defects and appeared to re-cast many complaints as an alleged failure to exercise discretion—raising, in turn, the potential relevance of judicial review-type time limits (Order 84) and doctrinal constraints.

(f) Francovich / EU law state liability claims (raised, but not effectively pleaded)

The plaintiff asserted that the amended pleading would plead “Francovich type” claims and cited Francovich v. Italy, Case C-6/90. The court did not determine any Francovich issues on the merits; the refusal turned on the inability of the document to function as a pleading and on the prejudice/unmanageability created by the way the claims were presented.

3.3 Legal reasoning: why the amendment failed

The refusal to amend rested on interlocking considerations:

  • Non-compliance with Order 19, r. 3: the draft was dominated by evidential narrative, commentary, expansive allegations and appendices, rather than a summary of material facts mapped to identifiable causes of action.
  • Unpleadable by the defendants: the defendants could not reasonably be expected to understand and answer a case spanning alleged State/industry conduct over 34 years (1991–2025), involving numerous non-parties, and accompanied by an enormous discovery agenda.
  • Prejudice and litigation paralysis: allowing such a pleading would create an unmanageable pre-trial and trial process, with oppressive discovery and witness/evidence difficulties—especially given the breadth (including documents allegedly predating 1991 and sought from multiple State and private entities).
  • Not the court’s function to re-draft: the court would not attempt to salvage or re-engineer the pleading to identify some narrower viable claim.
  • Process must end: after extensive indulgence and multiple iterations, the court applied the principle that litigation cannot become an open-ended pleading experiment.

3.4 Consequence: strike-out of the existing statement of claim

Once leave to amend was refused, the proceedings reverted to the existing statement of claim (dated 19 February 2020). On the basis of Simons J.’s earlier conclusion that the action could not proceed on those pleadings, O’Donnell J. held it should be struck out as disclosing no reasonable cause of action / bound to fail.

3.5 Impact and significance

  • Pleading discipline as a gatekeeping function: the decision reinforces that even serious allegations (including alleged systemic wrongdoing) must be articulated as pleadable causes of action supported by material facts, not as tribunal-style narratives.
  • Amendment discretion has hard limits: Order 28’s breadth does not permit amendments that would produce a pleading that is itself structurally abusive or unworkable.
  • Protection against oppressive litigation burden: the judgment foregrounds “prejudice” not merely as loss of a limitation defence, but as the practical impossibility and unfairness of defending an incoherent, massive pleading (especially in the shadow of expansive discovery demands).
  • Litigants in person: the court restated that self-representation does not relax compliance with procedural rules, and that judicial latitude cannot unfairly shift the cost/complexity burden to the opposing party.

4. Complex Concepts Simplified

  • Order 28 (amendment of pleadings): lets a party change its pleaded case, but only where the amendment is appropriate to decide the real dispute fairly and efficiently.
  • Order 19, r. 3 (what a pleading must contain): a pleading must set out the material facts in summary form—not the evidence, extensive commentary, or a full narrative history.
  • Strike-out (Order 19, rr. 28–29 principles): the court can end proceedings at an early stage where the claim is legally deficient (e.g., no reasonable cause of action) or plainly cannot succeed.
  • Misfeasance in public office: a demanding tort requiring specific ingredients (including an abuse of public power with the required state of mind), not merely poor administration or alleged failure to exercise discretion.
  • Francovich liability: an EU law doctrine under which a Member State can be liable in damages for certain serious breaches of EU law; however, such a claim still must be pleaded coherently within domestic procedural rules.
  • Prolix pleading: a statement of claim so lengthy and discursive that it obscures the issues, making it unfair or impractical to answer and manage.

5. Conclusion

[2026] IEHC 468 is a strong affirmation that the Irish courts’ generous approach to amendments and to litigants in person has firm procedural boundaries. A proposed amendment that is, by the plaintiff’s own description, “in substance, a new pleading”, and that expands into a decades-long, multi-actor narrative with extensive appendices and discovery demands, may be refused where it breaches Order 19, r. 3, is effectively unanswerable, and would cause serious prejudice.

The practical lesson is clear: even claims alleging systemic wrongdoing must be pleaded as a coherent, manageable set of causes of action supported by concise material facts—otherwise the court will refuse leave to amend and may strike out the proceedings altogether.