THE SUPREME Court has overturned a €120,700 damages award to a man which arose from an alleged hit-and-run incident.
The High Court had made the award to Patrick Rogers after finding he was probably struck in a hit-and-run.
In overturning the award, the Supreme Court said that while Mr Rogers’s injuries may have been the result of an impact from a vehicle, they may equally have been caused by a fall without the involvement of any motor car.
Mr Rogers (62), Dowdallshill, Dundalk, Louth, had sued the Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland (MIBI) arising out of what he claimed was an incident in which he was struck by a small green truck which left the scene.
The alleged incident took place on May 27th, 1996, sometime after Mr Rogers left a local pub where he said he had drunk seven pints of beer up to about midnight. He had also eaten at the pub.
He was found with his legs sticking out from a flowerbed at the nearby Maxol service station on the Newry Road, Dundalk, at around 5am. Witnesses thought he was drunk, and he was eventually brought home in a delivery truck. He said that just after the alleged incident, he could only recall oncoming lights. He said he recovered more of this memory three years later, and recalled “lights coming flying at me and I couldn’t get out of the way” as he passed the Maxol forecourt.
X-rays showed he had suffered skull fractures, but it was not possible to determine whether these were from being hit by a car or from a fall, the High Court heard.
In the High Court in 2003, Mr Justice Daniel Herbert ruled, on the balance of probabilities, that Mr Rogers’s injuries were the result of being struck by a vehicle which was driven on the footpath in a negligent manner, and held that Mr Rogers was not mentally or physically impaired as a result of his drinking that night.
The MIBI appealed that decision. Yesterday the Supreme Court allowed the appeal and overturned the award after finding that Mr Rogers had failed to overcome evidential problems he faced in bringing his claims. While Mr Rogers’s injuries may have been the result of an impact from a vehicle, they may equally have been caused by a fall without the involvement of any motor car, the court held.
Mr Justice Joseph Finnegan, delivering the court’s decision, said there was an unexplained two-hour time lapse in the period when Mr Rogers walked the short distance from the pub to the Maxol station where he was found.
It was not possible to explain matters by resorting to conjecture in answering questions about how, when and where he got the injury, the judge said. He had failed to overcome evidential problems in bringing his claim for damages and was not “cold sober” at the relevant times. The judge added he was happy to note that Mr Rogers had made a virtually full recovery.