The High Court dismissed a personal injuries action brought by Michael Ward, a minor, over a knee injury sustained when he was seven. The judgment was delivered in Sligo on 10 May 2017 by Mr Justice Hanna. The court found that the plaintiff had not established his case on the balance of probabilities.
The accident was said to have happened on a grassy area beside a service road at government offices in Longford. The plaintiff and his parents said children sometimes played football there outside office hours. The plaintiff’s account was that he chased a ball, slipped on stones or gravel and struck his right knee against a kerb. The injury required stitches and left a noticeable scar.
The grassy area belonged to the defendants. The premises were enclosed by a boundary wall, and the gates were locked outside office hours and over weekends. The plaintiff argued that the defendants owed him a duty of care and that the kerb was a hazard. His engineer considered the grassy area an “allurement”. The defendants pleaded that the plaintiff was trespassing, denied that the kerb was a hazard and disputed that the accident was foreseeable.
The judge rejected the argument that the lawn amounted to an allurement in the legal sense, which requires a temptation a normal child could not be expected to resist. He said the kerb bordered a service road, rather than a route people would ordinarily use to walk or drive. In the circumstances, he was not satisfied that the defendants could reasonably have contemplated children chasing footballs there or that the kerb constituted a hazard.
The court also heard that there was no evidence, beyond the plaintiff and his immediate family, of children regularly using the area to play. A premises officer’s evidence that he was unaware of such play was accepted as credible and persuasive. The judge was not persuaded that children used the grounds to the extent alleged and found that no more could reasonably have been expected of the defendants in securing the site.
The judge identified differing accounts of how the accident happened and was not sure on the balance of probabilities what had occurred. He also found that the evidence did not persuade him that the missing infill beside the kerb made a difference to the injury. No doctors gave oral evidence on that issue. The court therefore dismissed the action; the judgment records no damages award.