The Supreme Court has allowed an appeal over a student’s eye injury at a school in Enniscorthy and ordered a retrial on liability, finding that the trial judge applied the wrong legal approach to supervision. The appeal did not concern the €50,000 award for the injury itself.
Kenneth Murphy, who had been a minor but was of full age by the appeal, was 16 when he was injured on 7 May 1998. He was waiting in a senior resource area at a VEC school during lunch break when a chocolate bar thrown amid horseplay struck him in the eye.
Murphy’s evidence was that about nine students were throwing bars and that the activity got out of hand. He said there was normally supervision but no teacher in the area that day. His 16-year-old companion, identified in the judgment as K Keane, also said he saw no teacher there. The judgment records that documents obtained through discovery showed a teacher was assigned to supervise the resource area, and that the absence of a teacher at the relevant time was not disputed.
The school’s counsel applied for a direction that there was no case to answer and chose not to call evidence. The trial judge rejected that position and found for Murphy, reasoning in part that the school had scheduled a teacher to supervise the area and that a teacher would probably have controlled the incident.
On appeal, the Supreme Court said the school was responsible for its decision not to call witnesses and could not complain about that choice. But the trial judge had been asked to decide the case by applying the legal authorities on the standard of care owed by school authorities. Instead, he treated the school’s own roster as the required standard. The Supreme Court held that this was a mistaken, subjective approach: a school is not automatically liable for departing from a level of supervision beyond what the law requires.
The court therefore allowed the appeal because the trial judge had not assessed liability under the applicable objective standard of care. It ordered a retrial, leaving the liability issue to be determined again. The judgment does not decide the outcome of that retrial.