A mother of three who was awarded £100,000 damages arising out of a fall at a Cork shop, and now uses a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis, yesterday appealed successfully against the adequacy of the award. The Supreme Court, by a 2-1 majority, remitted the action back to the High Court for a retrial on the issues relating to damages.
Mrs Mary Curran (43), of Blarney, had sued Mr John Finn after she fell at his grocery shop at Coburg Street, Cork, in March 1993.
In his High Court judgment in March last year, Mr Justice O'Donovan found Mr Finn 100 per cent negligent and awarded £100,000 damages, but he found that the aggravation and progression of Mrs Curran's MS was not associated with the accident.
In his reserved judgment, Mr Justice Lynch said that Mrs Curran's medical experts had told the High Court that the pre-accident symptoms of her MS were sensory and therefore benign, and if it were not for the fall she would probably never have been seriously disabled. Mr Finn's experts claimed that the progression had nothing to do with the accident.
Mr Justice Lynch said he could not be sure that, if the trial judge had known Mrs Curran did not in April 1992 have the symptoms which he had attributed to her in his judgment, he would not have associated the progression of her MS with the fall. In those circumstances, he had to set aside the award of £100,000 and remit the matter for retrial on damages.
In a separate judgment, Mr Justice Murphy said that the otherwise thoughtful judgment of the trial judge was so flawed by the "regrettable but understandable" error recorded in his judgment that the appeal must be allowed.
Dissenting, Mr Justice Keane said it was a feature of the case that although Mrs Curran was treated by at least nine doctors, only one was called to give evidence on her behalf. In those circumstances, the trial judge was entitled to infer that the doctors would have been unable to support her case.
