The High Court has allowed a personal injuries claim over an alleged fall at the Coombe Hospital in Dublin to continue despite finding that the plaintiff had been responsible for inordinate and inexcusable delay.
Patricia Rooney alleged that she slipped on a wet and unsafe floor while leaving a ground-floor clinic at the hospital on August 18, 1998. The hospital was notified of the claim in September 1999 and its insurers denied liability later that month.
Proceedings were issued in August 2001. Pleadings closed in 2002, but the case then progressed slowly. The plaintiff’s discovery was not completed until December 2005. Further discovery, an inspection of the hospital and other procedural steps continued into 2007 and 2008.
The defendant applied in June 2008 to have the claim dismissed for want of prosecution. Ms Rooney conceded that the delay had been both inordinate and inexcusable. That did not automatically end the case: under the established Primor test, the court still had to decide where the balance of justice lay and whether the delay had caused serious prejudice.
The hospital relied in part on the inability of two cleaners, Sadie Byrne and Ann Mulhall, to remember the alleged accident. However, Ms Justice Dunne noted that the hospital had been told about the alleged fall in 1999 and could then have investigated its records and staff. She was not satisfied that the later delay had materially worsened its position.
The judge also considered the defendant’s own conduct. When the proceedings became active again in 2007, the hospital engaged with discovery and other steps rather than immediately seeking dismissal. Even after threatening a strike-out application in February 2008, it continued responding to procedural requests.
The court found that this conduct had allowed the plaintiff to continue spending money on the litigation without a sufficient sense that dismissal was imminent.
Ms Justice Dunne concluded that allowing the action to proceed would not be unfair to the defendant and that striking it out would be unjust to Ms Rooney. The dismissal application was therefore refused.