The Court of Appeal has rejected a Director of Public Prosecutions application to review a €25,000 fine imposed on Palfinger Ireland Limited, finding the sentence was not unduly lenient.
Palfinger Ireland had pleaded guilty in Limerick Circuit Court to failing, as an importer and supplier of equipment for use at work, to provide adequate information about a crane and its winch. The offence concerned the omission of part of the operator’s manual when the crane was supplied to Nationwide Crane Hire Limited in March 2003. The missing section covered regular inspections of the winch’s overload protection safety device.
The company was fined €25,000, with 12 months to pay, after a sentencing hearing in July 2022. The DPP argued that the fine was too low given the gravity of the offence, that the sentencing judge had failed to identify a headline sentence, and that the 12-year period before the accident was wrongly treated as mitigation.
The Court of Appeal said a sentence could be overturned only if it represented a substantial or gross departure from the appropriate sentence, establishing an error of principle. It found the sentencing judge’s failure to state a headline sentence was not, by itself, an error because he had assessed the company’s culpability and mitigating factors.
The court also rejected the claim that the sentencing judge treated the 12-year period as mitigation. It said he had considered that the crane had operated without incident during that period and had been serviced by Palfinger Ireland, including three months before the accident, as part of assessing the company’s moral culpability.
In August 2015, a crane hired from Nationwide was used during repair work on Thomond Bridge in Limerick. Three stonemasons were working in a suspended cage when the winch cable snapped after the overload protection device failed. Two men died; the third escaped from a harness. The court noted that a crane demonstration had been given when the equipment was delivered and that a computer download showed the safety feature had activated 156 times during 27 operational hours.
The judgment stressed the limits of Palfinger Ireland’s offence: the company was prosecuted for failing to provide the relevant manual section in 2003. It was not prosecuted for the 2015 accident, and the DPP did not allege that its statutory failure contributed to the two deaths. The court said the €200,000 fine imposed on Nationwide for a separate offence was therefore not an appropriate comparator.
The Court of Appeal concluded that the sentencing judge had properly assessed the offence, aggravating and mitigating factors, and deterrence. It dismissed the undue-leniency challenge, leaving Palfinger Ireland’s fine unchanged.