The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland has dismissed an appeal by Daniel McAteer, who had challenged a series of decisions made by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT). The court ruled that all four grounds of appeal were without merit, upholding the earlier High Court decision of Scoffield J to refuse leave to apply for judicial review.

McAteer had raised four grounds of appeal: that the SDT wrongly limited the scope of complaints under consideration; that the lower court erred in determining when time began to run for a judicial review application; that the court should have allowed a challenge to the SDT's substantive decision of 16 August 2021; and that there was a gap in the regulatory framework relating to the Legal Services Oversight Commissioner.

On the question of alternative remedies, the court found that Article 53 of the Solicitors (Northern Ireland) Order 1976 provided a bespoke statutory appeal route from SDT decisions. The court confirmed that judicial review is a remedy of last resort and that where Parliament has established a statutory appeal mechanism, that route will ordinarily be considered adequate. McAteer had previously acknowledged the availability of the Article 53 appeal route but failed to pursue it within the required 21-day time limit.

The court found that the judicial review application had been brought more than three and a half years after the grounds first arose, and that no satisfactory explanation for the delay had been provided. Under Order 53 rule 4 of the Rules of the Court of Judicature (NI) 1980, applications must be brought promptly and within three months of the date on which the grounds first arose. The court noted that the grounds relied upon by McAteer had been apparent as early as 2017. A separate ruling by McBride J, reported as [2024] NIKB 8, had also struck out McAteer's Article 53 statutory appeal as out of time, with an extension of time refused.

Regarding the SDT's substantive decision of August 2021, the court confirmed that this too fell within the scope of the statutory appeal mechanism. The court noted that McAteer himself had accepted that an appeal might be the more appropriate route. The lower court had also found that proposed grounds including irrationality, procedural unfairness, bias, and bad faith lacked any realistic prospect of success, with some lacking evidential foundation entirely.

On the regulatory lacuna argument, the court found that the issue had not been properly raised within the judicial review proceedings. No relevant relief had been sought and the Department of Finance, which bears responsibility for legislation that would give the Oversight Commissioner relevant powers, had not been joined as a respondent. The court also concluded that even if there had been a delay in commencing relevant statutory provisions, it would not affect the validity of the SDT decisions under challenge.

The appeal was dismissed in its entirety. The judgment was delivered by Treacy LJ, sitting with McBride J, and is neutral cited as [2026] NICA 25.