The High Court awarded a woman €55,000 in general damages after a 2016 road crash, along with €340 in agreed special damages. Liability had been admitted, so the hearing concerned assessment of damages only.
The woman was driving her son to an appointment in Tralee on 22 February 2016 when a car coming the other way crossed the white line onto her side of the road. She braked to avoid a head-on collision and a vehicle behind her struck her car. The judgment says the impact caused €6,000 worth of damage to her vehicle.
She developed neck, shoulder and upper-back pain that evening. Her evidence was that she continued to experience pain, sleep problems and occasional tingling in her right arm. She said some activities, including reversing and prolonged typing, remained difficult. The judge accepted that the woman was not deliberately exaggerating her symptoms, but found that they had improved in recent years. Recent examinations recorded full neck movement, and the judge considered her current symptoms intermittent and mild or at the lower end of moderate.
The medical evidence differed on how much of her continuing symptoms were attributable to the crash. The woman’s orthopaedic surgeon, Mr Mangan, considered that the crash had injured her already-degenerative cervical spine, accelerated the degeneration and caused ongoing symptoms. The defendants’ orthopaedic surgeon, Professor Masterson, considered that the crash had caused a short-term exacerbation, with later symptoms more likely related to underlying disc degeneration.
The judge accepted Mr Mangan’s evidence that the crash accelerated the degeneration and caused symptoms the woman had not experienced before. The judge found her past and current symptoms were caused, or substantially caused, by the crash, and awarded €35,000 for pain and suffering to date.
For the future, the judge considered continued improvement likely, with symptoms expected to be intermittent and reasonably mild. However, the evidence could not establish on the balance of probabilities what the woman’s condition would have been without the crash, or how much future symptoms were attributable to it rather than pre-existing degeneration. The judge therefore awarded €20,000 for future pain and suffering—half the amount that might have been awarded if the future symptoms had been shown to be wholly caused by the crash. The total general damages award was €55,000.