The High Court has dismissed a carpenter’s negligence claim against his former employer over injuries he suffered when a co-worker struck him with a hammer at a work site in Monkstown, Co Dublin, in December 2013.
In a judgment delivered on 24 June 2016, Mr Justice Cross found that the employer had been told about earlier threats and was contacted again on the morning of the incident. But he held that the company was not negligent in the steps it took, including arranging for the men to work on different floors and telling the carpenter to contact the managing director if problems arose.
The plaintiff sued Andrew Best Roof Limited directly for allegedly failing to provide a safe system and place of work. He did not base his claim on the employer being legally responsible for the co-worker’s actions. The judgment says he also brought separate proceedings against the alleged assailant; it does not give their outcome.
The accounts of the lead-up and confrontation differed. The carpenter said the co-worker had threatened him after an earlier dispute in Naas and that he asked to be moved from the Monkstown site. The managing director denied being told of earlier threats, but said the carpenter called that morning to say “something is going to happen”. The court accepted that threats had been made and that another employee had earlier conveyed concerns to the managing director.
The judge found that the co-worker made a derogatory remark at the end of the work day, prompting the carpenter to turn back. He accepted the carpenter’s evidence that the co-worker first struck him on the forehead with a mallet, after which the carpenter punched him. The co-worker then struck the carpenter around the right eye with a hammer. The carpenter suffered bruising, swelling and temporary vision problems, but made an excellent recovery and his vision returned.
The court said an employer must take reasonable steps when it knows, or ought to know, of specific threats to workers’ health and safety. It distinguished this case from a cited decision involving a known previous physical assault by an employee. Here, despite the threats and “bad blood”, there had been no previous physical assault of that kind. The judge said requiring the employer to separate the men onto different sites would impose too strict a duty in the circumstances.
The court concluded that the employer had not acted unreasonably and was not negligent. Although the judge considered the carpenter the more innocent party in the assault, he expressly did not decide who was at fault between the two men. The claim against the employer therefore failed.