The High Court has dismissed a woman’s personal injury action against Scoil Mhuire National School after she fell on steps at the school in Ardee, Co Louth. The court found that the school had not breached its duty of care and that the evidence did not establish that a handrail would have stopped or reduced her fall.
The woman, identified in the judgment as Ciara Finlay, fell on the morning of 30 August 2017 while descending steps between the school playground and the driveway. She was accompanying her daughter to school on the first day of the new school year. The judgment says she suffered fractures to her right ankle and left foot and continued to experience intermittent ankle pain.
Ms Finlay accepted that she did not know what caused her to lose her footing. Her claim at trial focused on the absence of handrails. Her engineer said that fitting rails on both sides would have been good practice and relatively simple and inexpensive. He accepted there was no statutory requirement for rails on external steps of this type.
The school’s principal and deputy principal gave evidence that the steps were heavily used, included in annual risk assessments and had no known previous complaints or recorded falls. The deputy principal said the school had not considered handrails for the steps, which remained without them after the accident. A plea that Ms Finlay was contributorily negligent for not using another entrance was not pursued at trial.
The court said the absence of a specific building regulation did not by itself settle whether the school had met its duty to visitors. It considered the steps’ history of use, the lack of previous incidents, the school’s safety procedures and the evidence about handrails. It found no evidence that retrofitting rails to comparable external steps was established practice. In the circumstances, the judge considered that requiring rails would amount to a “council of perfection”.
The judge accepted Ms Finlay as a straightforward and truthful witness, but said it remained uncertain whether she would have caught a rail or whether doing so would have arrested or reduced her fall. The court held that those possibilities could not establish causative negligence on the balance of probabilities. It found no breach of the school’s common duty of care and dismissed the action. The judgment did not make a general rule that handrails are never required on external steps.