Two Supreme Court judges would quash a €3,000 assessment of Bridget Delaney’s ankle-injury claim and send it back to the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB) for a fresh assessment under the law and Book of Quantum that applied before 24 April 2021.
The position is set out in a judgment delivered by Gerard Hogan on 9 April 2024. The judgment says Hogan was authorised to state that Whelan agreed with his reasoning and proposed orders. It is one judgment in a multi-judge appeal; it does not establish that these were the orders made by the Court as a whole.
Delaney maintains that she injured her ankle in a fall on a defective footpath in Dungarvan, County Waterford, on 12 April 2019. The judgment says she used an orthopaedic boot for about four weeks and was expected to have ankle swelling for six to nine months. She applied to PIAB on 4 June 2019. PIAB assessed the claim on 14 May 2021, after the personal injury guidelines had come into force, and offered €3,000. She rejected the offer and received authorisation to bring proceedings on 3 June 2021. Her separate proceedings against Waterford County Council were still awaiting judicial determination, the judgment states.
Hogan’s view was that the guidelines could not acquire binding legal force through the Judicial Council’s approval alone. He reasoned that giving them such force without later legislation would transfer law-making power to the judiciary. He considered the 2021 Act to have subsequently confirmed the guidelines and given them legal effect, but concluded that a transitional provision applying the new regime to certain unresolved claims was unconstitutional as applied to Delaney’s pending claim. In his view, it retrospectively affected her right to pursue the claim and treated similar claimants differently according to when PIAB assessed them.
Hogan proposed declaring the relevant transitional provision unconstitutional, quashing PIAB’s assessment and remitting the claim for reassessment under the pre-2021 law. He also proposed a declaration that section 7(2)(g) of the Judicial Council Act 2019 was unconstitutional in its present form. These are Hogan’s conclusions and proposed orders, with Whelan’s agreement; the source excerpt does not set out the Supreme Court’s overall disposition.