The Court of Appeal allowed John O’Dowd’s appeal against the length of his driving disqualification but imposed a four-year ban on a different legal basis, running from the date of the original order.
The court found that the sentencing judge had wrongly treated a four-year disqualification as mandatory after O’Dowd pleaded guilty to careless driving causing death. It quashed that part of the sentence and resentenced him with an ancillary disqualification, which required the court to assess whether he was unfit to drive.
The appeal concerned only the disqualification. The Court of Appeal left in place the one-year prison sentence, suspended in full for one year. The original court had also taken two other charges into consideration: driving a dangerously defective vehicle and using a vehicle without excise duty.
The case arose from a collision on 17 September 2019 on the R741 Gorey to Wexford road at Knockskimolin, Oulart, Co Wexford. O’Dowd’s Iveco van and trailer struck the rear of a Volkswagen Polo that had stopped while its driver, Katie Grimes, waited to turn right. Her mother, Alison Grimes, died after sustaining severe head trauma and multiple rib fractures. The Polo’s rear-seat passenger was initially unresponsive and was believed to have suffered a back injury.
A Garda forensic collision report described an unobstructed view of the collision area from 148 metres away. The investigator said a roadworthy vehicle travelling at or below the 80km/h speed limit could have stopped in that distance. The court heard that O’Dowd’s van had defective rear brakes, but the evidence was that the defects were unlikely to have affected the ability to avoid this collision. The Court of Appeal identified a failure to react in time to the slowing Polo as the major cause.
In deciding that a discretionary ban was warranted, the appeal court cited the circumstances of the collision, O’Dowd’s two earlier drink-driving convictions and disqualifications, and the defective brakes on the van and trailer. It said these matters raised a serious question about his fitness to drive. The court acknowledged that the brake defects were unlikely to have affected collision avoidance in this case, but said driving the vehicle combination in that condition was relevant to its assessment.
The court said the four-year period itself was not erroneous. It substituted an ancillary disqualification for the original consequential order, with the same four-year term running from the original disqualification date. It also said it had taken O’Dowd’s personal circumstances into account.