The High Court allowed an appeal by the Garda Commissioner and the Minister for Justice and Equality against a Circuit Court award to a garda whose car was deliberately set alight at Clara Garda Station in 2009.
The Circuit Court had awarded the plaintiff €5,700 and costs. In the High Court, Mr Justice Binchy found that the destruction of the car and property inside it resulted directly from her work in a drugs enforcement unit. But she was off duty when the attack happened, and the car was within the station precincts. The court held that the Garda Síochána Code did not provide compensation for property damaged in a station.
The plaintiff joined An Garda Síochána in 2003 and lived in the residential quarters at Clara station from 2006. She told the court that her unit had recently seized drugs and cash from a local gang, and that gang members knew her car and where she lived. She said a gang member had recorded her car’s registration and that, about a week before the fire, members of the group had acted abusively during a search.
At about 3am on 24 July 2009, the plaintiff and a colleague heard an alarm. The colleague saw that her car had been set alight; it was destroyed, and his car was damaged. The plaintiff said she identified the perpetrator on CCTV, but the footage was not preserved and no prosecution followed. The defendants did not dispute the incident or the background she described. The judge noted that the plaintiff’s account of intelligence linking the attack to her work was hearsay, but found the evidence as a whole established the connection.
The plaintiff claimed €6,405 for her losses, including the shortfall after insurance and salvage payments and the estimated cost of losing her no-claims bonus. She had initially claimed a higher sum, but reduced it after learning that her insurers did not require her to recover their payment through these proceedings.
The claim relied on Chapter F 12.2 of the Garda Síochána Code. The judge said the Code’s first sentence on property in stations or official quarters was clear: the State assumed no liability for loss or damage there. He treated the following advice to insure against “usual risks” as advisory, not as an exception for unusual attacks. The claim under the Code therefore failed.
The judge also said the clause did not set a general €317.43 maximum: it provided for local processing of claims up to that amount, while larger claims were neither expressly included nor excluded and remained within the Commissioner’s discretion. He rejected reliance on negligence because it had not been pleaded, and said the Code was too unclear to support a legitimate expectation of compensation. The court allowed the defendants’ appeal, overturning the Circuit Court award. It did not prevent them from making an ex gratia payment.