The High Court awarded €1,591,957.70 in damages to the dependants of farmer Michael Davoren, whose widow sued over his death following medical treatment in 2003. The defendants did not contest liability, and the hearing concerned damages only.
In a judgment delivered on 21 December 2011, Mr Justice O’Neill assessed damages under Part IV of the Civil Liability Act 1961. The award included €44,975.79 for solatium, funeral and related expenses, and administration costs.
The court recorded the parties’ agreement that the dependants’ financial loss of support was €275,000. It also considered an inheritance claim concerning Maura Davoren, the deceased’s mother, who died in 2009. Evidence showed that she had made a will leaving her estate to her son, but later changed it; her final will left the estate to her daughter, Mary O’Regan.
The judge found it highly probable that, had Michael Davoren lived, he would have inherited his mother’s estate and that the estate would ultimately have passed to his wife and children. He rejected the defendants’ arguments that this was an unrecoverable loss of chance, that a later event had broken the chain of causation, or that the loss was too remote. He awarded €1,546,982 for the loss of the expected inheritance, comprising assessed losses for farm income, rental income and the estate’s value.
The court also considered the benefit of the dependants’ accelerated receipt of the Ballycahill farm, which the deceased had owned. It set that benefit at €535,777, replacing an actuarial figure that included €320,128 in compound interest with an assessment based on the farm’s profits during the period considered. That amount exceeded the agreed €275,000 loss of support, leaving no net award under that head.
The judge declined to deduct the excess from the inheritance award. He said that award had already been discounted to reflect its accelerated receipt, so another deduction would count the same benefit twice. The resulting total damages were €1,591,957.70. The judgment does not state a separate order on interest or costs.