Shelbourne's court action fails

While Shelbourne left to consider their position following yesterday's High Court ruling to uphold the decision to return the nine points to St Patrick's Athletic, representatives of the FAI and Eircom League cautiously welcomed what looks like the end of the Paul Marney affair.

After Mr Justice O'Sullivan had declined to grant Shelbourne an injunction preventing the implementation of the arbitrator's report into the long-running dispute the association's general secretary, Brendan Menton, said: "We wish that we hadn't been here.

"We're not happy because the people in football decided that this matter should be decided by people in football and basically that has been upheld here today. Happily, though, it now appears that the league will be decided by the best team on the pitch and that is clearly something that we would all like to welcome."

Shelbourne have been ordered to pay half of the organisation's costs in addition to their own.

The fact that St Patrick's Athletic will now almost certainly retain the disputed nine points does represent a successful outcome for the organisation and its chief administrator, who said yesterday that his primary interest over the past few months had been to see that the structures and procedures laid down under the FAI's rules prevailed in the end. That, Menton said, had been done and the integrity of the association's rules had been upheld.

"I'm not commenting on the merits of the decision taken by either the appeal board or the arbitrator, I didn't do it at the time and I'm not going to do it now. The bottom line is that if those decisions had gone the other way then I would have been here today defending a different position because my role is to uphold the decisions reached through the procedures we have at our disposal.

"The simple fact now is that the decision not to deduct the nine points from St Patrick's has been upheld in a court of law."

In his judgment, however, Mr Justice O'Sullivan had gone out of his way to express some sympathy with Shelbourne's view that the rules of the FAI and Eircom League did not sit well together. "The lack of clarity in the interplay between the two sets of rules," had, he said, not only caused confusion but contributed to the dissatisfaction felt by Shelbourne as they considered how to pursue their case.

Menton's view afterwards was that the supremacy of the association's rulebook had been upheld and that any minor difficulties that exist in relation to the way the league's rules operate are matters to be dealt with by the review of that organisation's regulations which was instigated several months ago by league commissioner Roy Dooney.

The league's senior administrator also welcomed the judgment but said that he simply felt "glad that it's over" rather than in any way vindicated by the way he case had gone.

For Shelbourne, Ollie Byrne said that the club and its legal advisers would consider the implications of the judgment before deciding whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.

It's possible that the club's board could opt to go all the way but, having spent some €35,000 on getting this far it seems unlikely that they will want to pursue any further action which after yesterday's judgment looks to be a lost cause.