The High Court rejected Kerry Foods Limited’s application to dismiss a personal injury claim under section 26 of the Civil Liability and Courts Act 2004, finding that the plaintiff had not knowingly given false or misleading evidence. It awarded him €46,125, including general damages and agreed special damages, for injuries from a 2006 road collision.
The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Irvine on 30 March 2012, concerned a collision on the Naas dual carriageway on 10 April 2006. The plaintiff’s stationary Land Rover was struck from behind by an articulated truck. He had a history of back pain and significant spinal degeneration, but the judge found that his difficulties before the collision were intermittent and had not stopped him from coaching rugby.
The defendant argued that the claim was fraudulent, describing it as a “small lie that got out of control”. It relied on inconsistencies in the plaintiff’s accounts of when his pain began, gaps in the medical records and the absence of an immediate claim for personal injuries. It also challenged the reliability of a physiotherapist/osteopath’s recollection, recorded in a report prepared about five years after the events.
The judge said the plaintiff’s evidence was fragile, particularly about when symptoms began, but found it substantially supported by the practitioner’s recollection that the plaintiff was in severe pain and linked it to a recent road accident. On the balance of probabilities, she accepted that the collision caused soft tissue injuries to his lower back. She was not satisfied that the defendant had established grounds to dismiss the proceedings under section 26.
The court found that the injuries made the plaintiff’s back more symptomatic and brought forward to some degree his eventual need for surgery. However, it did not accept the evidence that the collision advanced the operations by about five years, and the plaintiff did not claim that the surgeries themselves were caused by the accident. The judge assessed the soft tissue injury as seriously debilitating for about two to three years and found that the collision ended his rugby coaching career.
The court declined to award a specific sum for past or future loss of earnings. It found there was no satisfactory evidence of the plaintiff’s net income from gardening, and that his pre-existing back condition and other circumstances limited the basis for such a claim. The €45,000 general damages award included a modest uplift for minor collision-related income loss. With €1,125 in agreed special damages, the total award was €46,125.