The Court of Appeal has dismissed a worker’s appeal against a finding that Sligo County Council was not legally responsible for his injuries when a lorry struck a convoy of Council workers on a roadside hard shoulder.
In a judgment delivered on 23 February 2023, Ms Justice Ní Raifeartaigh agreed with the conclusion of Mr Justice Noonan, whose reasons she adopted, and said the Council could not be regarded as a legal cause of the collision or the worker’s injuries. Ms Justice Costello agreed with her judgment. The appeal was dismissed.
The lorry driver had fallen asleep while driving a 15-tonne vehicle in cruise control at 88kmh, above the 80kmh speed limit. The judgment states that the driver was later convicted of careless driving causing death and serious bodily injury. His employer, MDS Distribution Limited, was liable for the plaintiff’s injuries through vicarious liability. The appeal concerned whether the Council was also liable, at least in part.
The plaintiff alleged that the Council had failed to postpone the roadworks on a particularly busy traffic day, provide a 1.2-metre safety zone, use adequate warnings or traffic controls, and place a sufficiently substantial buffer vehicle behind the workers. The judgment records that warning signs and a pickup truck with flashing lights and an illuminated arrow were in place.
Ms Justice Ní Raifeartaigh said the Council should have anticipated ordinary roadside risks, including busy traffic, speeding and inattentive drivers. But she considered the particular combination in this collision—an asleep professional driver, a lorry travelling above the speed limit and its 15-tonne weight—too unusual to fall within the range of reasonably foreseeable events. She said the Council was not an insurer of its employees.
She also examined whether the alleged failures had legally caused the collision. The judgment says there was no evidence linking the volume of traffic to the crash; the lorry was the only vehicle on that side of the road at the time. It found no established causal link between the suggested additional traffic controls and the collision. There was also no evidence that a larger buffer vehicle would probably have absorbed enough of the impact to prevent or reduce the injuries. The court said the causal link between the proposed 1.2-metre zone and the collision had not been established.
The judge considered that the trial judge’s use of the concept of novus actus interveniens was not particularly helpful for analysing some of the Council’s alleged failures. However, she concluded that the appeal would have the same outcome under the causation framework argued by the parties. The Court of Appeal therefore dismissed the appeal; the judgment does not set out a separate order on costs.