The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by the school defendants in a personal injuries case brought by Treasa Kilgannon over a fall outside Dromore National School in Sligo.
The appeal concerned where Ms Kilgannon fell on 19 February 2013. She said she lost her footing on a section of footpath where a kerbstone was missing, about 30 feet from the school gate. The defendants maintained she fell beside the gate, where they said there was no similar defect. The parties had agreed that the school’s liability depended on which account the court accepted.
Ms Kilgannon had gone to collect her daughter, M, after the school called to say the child was upset. She was carrying her three-year-old daughter, C, when she fell and fractured her right wrist. A witness who came to help said Ms Kilgannon was just outside the school gates, but did not appear to have seen the fall itself. The school secretary and principal also gave accounts of what Ms Kilgannon had said after the accident; Ms Kilgannon disputed those accounts.
The High Court found for Ms Kilgannon. On appeal, the defendants challenged the trial judge’s assessment of the evidence and the reasons given for preferring her account. They abandoned their challenges to damages and to the absence of a finding of contributory negligence.
In a judgment delivered on 18 December 2019, Mr Justice Noonan said the trial judge was entitled to find Ms Kilgannon credible. He highlighted the school principal’s accident report, completed two days after the fall, which described Ms Kilgannon as tripping “on the step of the footpath outside the gate”. The evidence established there was no footpath or kerb directly in front of the gate, where the defendants said she fell. The Court of Appeal considered the report consistent with Ms Kilgannon’s account and damaging to the defendants’ version.
The appeal court also noted that the principal’s diary entry and accident report could not corroborate her own testimony simply because she had written them. Their evidential significance lay in whether they were inconsistent with the writer’s account. The court accepted that the trial judge had no evidential basis for linking the sound of the impact to where Ms Kilgannon fell, and said his comments about the principal rushing to judgment may have been wide of the mark. It nevertheless considered those points aside from the central finding.
The court concluded that credible evidence supported the High Court’s decision and that the trial judge’s reasons were apparent when the judgment was read as a whole. It dismissed the appeal. The judgment does not set out a new damages award or other order beyond dismissal.