The High Court awarded a plaintiff €96,758 in damages after assessing injuries from a road collision in which his car was struck from behind by a truck. The hearing concerned damages only.
Ms Justice Carmel Stewart assessed €90,000 in general damages and €6,758 in special damages for the cost of orthopaedic surgery to repair the plaintiff’s shoulder. She also awarded him the costs of the action, with costs to be adjudicated if the parties could not agree.
The plaintiff, who was 57 at the time of the collision, said he had ongoing shoulder pain and headaches after the crash on 13 August 2020. The court found him a reliable and credible witness. It accepted that he had a right rotator cuff tear, established by radiological examination, and that the injury affected his dominant arm. The judge described it as the dominant injury and assessed it at €75,000: €50,000 for pain and suffering to date and €25,000 for the future.
The judge said surgery was indicated by both the plaintiff’s orthopaedic surgeon and the defendant’s consultant. The plaintiff intended to have the procedure but was reluctant to proceed immediately given his cardiac history. The need for surgery had been disputed, although its cost had been agreed.
The court also accepted that the plaintiff continued to suffer headaches and treated them as a type of head injury. It did not consider that the Personal Injuries Guidelines’ categories adequately captured his symptoms, and rejected the plaintiff’s proposed classification under a brain-damage category. The judge said €30,000 would be appropriate for the headaches as a stand-alone award, then increased the overall general damages award by €15,000 to account for the additional injuries and maintain proportionality.
The court awarded €1,000 each for a left wrist injury, a minor neck injury and soft-tissue chest trauma, which had cleared relatively quickly. It was not satisfied on the balance of probabilities that a rib fracture had occurred. Although the possibility had been discussed in the emergency department and caused the plaintiff concern because of his heart stent, the radiologist’s report recorded no fracture on the X-ray.
The judgment records that the case was before the court for assessment of damages only. It does not set out a liability determination in this assessment.