The High Court awarded Karen Hurley Ahern €100,000 in general damages after finding that Dr Victor Moore probably failed to place sterilisation clips on her fallopian tubes. The judgment included the six months of distress surrounding her son Samuel’s illness and death in the assessment of her damages, while finding that his severe congenital condition was not caused by the negligence.
Mr Justice Ryan delivered the judgment on 1 February 2013. The court considered liability and damages arising from a laparoscopic sterilisation performed in February 2001. The judgment records that Ms Hurley Ahern became pregnant in 2002 and gave birth by emergency Caesarean section to Samuel, who died at six months old.
The central factual dispute was whether Dr Moore had correctly applied the clips. He was too ill to give evidence. The court considered his operation note and evidence from Dr Cathy Burke, who delivered Samuel and performed a further sterilisation. Her note said that four clips had migrated to the broad ligament. The judge found that the note did not establish where the clips had originally been placed: Dr Burke had not been investigating why the first sterilisation failed, and her suggestion that the clips had migrated from the fallopian tubes was an inference.
Both sides’ experts agreed that proper placement of two clips on each side would not reasonably explain the later pregnancy through regrowth of the tubes. The defence expert raised a fistula only as an extremely remote theoretical possibility. Accepting the plaintiffs’ expert evidence, the judge concluded that Dr Moore probably had not applied the clips correctly and had been negligent.
The court held that Ms Hurley Ahern could recover for the failed procedure, pregnancy, delivery and further operation. Applying the approach in McFarlane v Tayside, it found no rigid cut-off at childbirth: the distress and disruption through Samuel’s six-month life formed part of the continuing consequences of the negligence and were not too remote. The judge noted that she had a blood-clotting condition that made pregnancy more hazardous, but that she suffered no blood clot. He also expressly found that neither plaintiff suffered physical or psychological injury or nervous shock, and that Samuel’s disability was not caused by the defendants’ negligence.
The judge rejected Garrett Ahern’s claim. Although he suffered severe distress, the court said the law required proof of a defined psychiatric injury for recovery on that basis; his claim did not meet that requirement. Personal expenses he incurred were treated as unrecoverable pure economic loss. Travel and overnight expenses and his unspecified earnings losses remained disputed, with further argument required if no agreement was reached. The judgment did not determine those items.