Data Protection Commissioner consideration of complaint does not render associated claim for breach of statutory duty res judicata

Defamation - Data Protection – application to strike out defamation aspect of proceedings – statute barred - no reasonable cause of action - failure to comply with Freedom of Information request - alleged that defendant stated that disconnection was due to non-payment – admitted disconnection – admitted that he should not have been disconnected - applied a goodwill credit to his account – apologized in the context of his complaint – further run in in relation to a price increase - came to suspect that there were adverse annotations on his customer file regarding why he had been disconnected - asked that the annotations on his account be amended to reflect the truth of what had occurred – annotations amended – data request – no timely reply – complaint to Data Commissioner – Commissioner held that the respondent had breached the 40 day time limit - documentation received with the data access request did not fully tally with the documentation that he already had to hand – queried the documentation – no meaningful reply – additional documentation - further adverse experience – not pleaded in proceedings – did not appreciate that he may have been defamed until he received the documents and by that time he had already issued the proceedings – one year limitation period for defamation proceedings – outside that period – defamation portion of the proceedings struck out – argued that his data protection complaint had already been determined by the Commissioner – Court refused to strike out the data protection element of the claim – complains about event included in previous complaint and subsequent to the subject matter of that complaint – Commissioner plays no role in determining whether a liability presents under the data protection legislation – complaint before Commissioner is non-adversarial – relying on the determination in proceedings -Commissioner inquisitorial consideration of matters does not yield some form of res judicata as regards the bringing of an associated claim for breach of statutory duty –