Appeal. support of this view to West v. Downman (1), decided by the Court of Appeal in England, and Harpin v. Sykes (2). 1903. THE KING (O'REILLY) v. JUSTICES OF FERMANAGH. I am accordingly of opinion that the judgment of the King's Bench Division is right, and should be affirmed with costs. FITZ GIBBON, L. J. :— The Act of Parliament, if clear, must be obeyed, whatever the result may be, and in my opinion there is no reasonable doubt as to its construction. The Petty Sessions Act, sect. 10, sub-sect. 4, applies to "all cases of summary jurisdiction " by its opening words. It then proceeds to specify certain cases, and finally it enacts that "in any other case" the limitation of six months shall apply. This subdivision is exhaustive, and it must include every case in which the Justices have summary jurisdiction, unless otherwise excluded. They have summary jurisdiction under the Loan Fund Act, and in exercising it they are, in the absence of any provision to the contrary, controlled by the Petty Sessions Act, section 10, subsect. 4. The note in the present case does not belong to the class of promissory notes which were sub modo validated by the Act of 1900, nor does it appear to have suffered from any of the defects which that Act remedied. It might, perhaps, be contended that a note otherwise validated by the Act of 1900 would get what I may call a new lease of life, or a fresh start, in respect of the six months limitation, but I cannot hold that the Act of 1900 revived a right to sue upon a note to which it did not otherwise apply. HOLMES, L. J. :— Charitable Loan Societies seem to have been an old institution in Ireland, and since the year 1823 they have been the subject of several statutes. The Act now regulating them is 6 & 7 Vict. c. 91, which repeals all previous enactments, and lays down elaborate provisions for their creation and management. Section 25 prescribes the form of the notes or securities to be Appeal. 1903. THE KING (O'REILLY) t. JUSTICES OF Holmes, L.J. taken by a Loan Society for money advanced; and section 30 enacts where there is default in payment that the debt may be enforced by summary procedure either before one Justice of the Peace, or at Petty Sessions. It has been held by the King's Bench Division that this is the only remedy for recovering the amount FERMANAGH. of the loan-Moore v. Donagher (1); and this carefully considered decision has been neither questioned nor criticised during the argument of this appeal. The sole point in controversy is, whether the summary proceedings must be commenced within six months from the time when the promissory notes became payable. There is not in the Act of 1843, nor, I believe, in any of the previous statutes repealed thereby, a period limited for the enforcement of the sum due; and unless the law has been since changed, the summons in the present case was served in time. I am satisfied, however, that it has been changed. The Act 12 & 13 Vict. c. 70, was passed, as appears from its preamble, to consolidate, with such additions and alterations as might be deemed necessary, the statutes relating to the duties of Justices in Ireland in respect of summary convictions and orders, including, as the 8th and other sections show, orders for the payment of money made upon complaints in that behalf. Section 11 enacts that in all cases where no time is already or shall hereafter be specially limited for making any complaint, or laying any information in the Act or Acts of Parliament relating to each particular case, such complaint shall be made and such information shall be laid within six calendar months from the time when the matter of such complaint or information respectively arose. No explanation of this section could be clearer than its own language. No time was specially limited in the Act of 1843 for making the complaint mentioned in the 30th section thereof in case of a borrower failing to pay his note or security in the manner agreed on; and, therefore, on the passing of the Act of 1849 it became necessary to make such complaint within six calendar months from the time when the matter of complaint arose. The 11th section, which I have quoted from the Irish Act of 1849, is in the same terms as the 11th section of the English statute of the previous year: 11 & 12 Vict. c. 43; and (1) [1903] 2 I. R. 290. Appeal. 1903. v. FERMANAGH. Holmes, L.J. Mr. Henry, in the course of his argument, and Gibson, J., in his judgment in Atthill v. Woods (1), have referred to several cases THE KING showing with what strictness the time limit therein prescribed has (O'REILLY) been applied to every branch of summary jurisdiction. The Act JUSTICES OF of 1849 only remained in force for two years, when it was repealed by the Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act, 1851, passed to consolidate and amend the Acts regulating proceedings at Petty Sessions and the duties of Justices of the Peace out of Quarter Sessions in Ireland. As might be expected, this statute contains most minute provisions as to the time limit within which complaints must be brought. Section 10, sub-section 4, enacts that in all cases of summary jurisdiction the complaint shall be made, when it relates to the non-payment of certain rates and taxes at any time after the dates of the warrant authorizing their collection: when it relates to the non-payment of money for wages, hire, or tuition, within one year from the termination of the period in respect of which it is payable: when it relates to trespass, within two months from the time when the trespass shall have occurred; and in all other cases within six months from the time when the cause of complaint shall have arisen, but not otherwise. Is it possible to introduce into the clearly universal words with which this clause concludes an exception in favour of complaints for non-payment of notes or securities under the Loan Fund Act of 1843 ? I am of opinion that it is not; and that the question raised in this case could not have been argued previous to the passing of the Charitable Loan Societies (Ireland) Act, 1900. We can gather from the provisions of that statute the circumstances that led to its enactment. The management of these societies in this country had been for a long time characterized by ignorance and carelessness; and in and subsequently to the year 1896 there was a series of authoritative decisions that many of their securities were irrecoverable on one or other of the grounds specified in the 1st section of the Act. In the result their financial position was seriously endangered; and the Act of 1900 was passed for the purpose of enabling them to recover sums of money that had been borrowed and not been repaid, notwithstanding (1) [1903] 2 I. R. 305. Appeal. 1903. THE KING (O'REILLY) v. JUSTICES OF certain illegalities and irregularities in the way in which the loans were made. It is to be noted that there is nothing on the face of the Act to show that any embarrassment had arisen from the six months' limitation. There is no reported, and as far as I am aware no unreported, case in which this question FERMANAGH. was discussed, and according to my experience, however defective the securities might have been in other respects, they were regularly renewed at short intervals at least down to the year 1896, when the illegalities began to be discovered. Now it is impossible to conceive that if the provision of the Petty Sessions Act as to bringing the complaint within six months applied previous to 1900 to notes given to Loan Societies, the Act of that year altered the law in this respect either expressly or by implication. As I have already said, it relates to a wholly different subject-matter; and it only applies to notes having one or more of the defects enumerated in the 1st section. A note good and valid on the 1st March, 1899, is outside the scope and operation of this statute; and a note irrecoverable on that day for any reason other than those specified is given by it no new validity. I do not think, however, that counsel for the appellant rely on the Act of 1900 as altering the previous law. They rather use it for the purpose of showing that the period of limitation prescribed by the Petty Sessions Act never applied to summary proceedings for the recovery of debts due to Loan Societies. They say that the provisions of the later Act assume that such proceedings might be taken after a much longer interval, and that this Court ought to make a similar assumption. This would be a very dangerous principle to act on in construing a statute which for fifty years has been supposed to be free from doubt or ambiguity. It is a common complaint that Acts of Parliament are sometimes drafted and passed in ignorance of the existing law; but if this ignorance is to be used for the purpose of modifying the plain and well-understood meaning of previous enactments, the result must be hopeless confusion. It is, however, unnecessary in the present case to consider such an extreme proposition, as I am satisfied that there is nothing in the Act of 1900 from which the inference suggested by the appellant's Holmes, L.J. 1903. THE KING (O'REILLY) JUSTICES OF Holmes, L.J. Appeal. counsel can be drawn. The 1st section relates to notes current or unpaid on the 1st March, 1899, which were incapable of being enforced by reason of certain specified defects. These notes could not have been sued on at all except by virtue of the Act, but its FERMANAGH. enactment gave them validity. At that date there arose for the first time a cause of action in respect of them, and the period within which proceedings were to be taken ran therefrom. But there is nothing in the Act that revives a note otherwise good if barred by lapse of time. The statute does not apply to such notes. They could have been sued on, irrespective of the Act of 1900, up to the expiration of the period limited for proceedings, and they could not be enforced after that period, whether it came to an end before or subsequent to the 1st March, 1899. The draftsman did not concern himself with a time limit which was foreign to his purpose. He left it as it was, with the result that certain invalid notes which became recoverable for the first time on the passing of the Act could be sued on within the six following months. As far as I can see, the Act would have been drafted in the same way whether the time limited for a complaint had been six months or six years; and no inference in favour of one period more than of another, or indeed in favour of any period, can be drawn from its provisions. I am therefore of opinion that the appeal should be disallowed. The Lord Chancellor stated that Lord Justice Walker, who had heard the argument, but who was unavoidably absent, concurred in the judgments. Solicitors for the Loan Fund Board: E. & G. Stapleton. R. D. M. |