A woman who suffered injuries to her neck and back in a car accident has been awarded €10,000 at the Circuit Court.
She received the sum despite the judge saying that she had been prone to “prone to exaggeration, misdescription and apparent falsehood”.
Speaking in court, the plaintiff, who resides in north Dublin, said that she was travelling in her husband’s car when it collided with another vehicle. The incident happened in 2015.
The woman sued her husband and the two individuals whose names were registered on the second car. The mother-of-four said that following the accident, which happened at a junction in the west of the capital, she suffered injuries to her neck and back and had to be detained at a Dublin hospital for 24 hours.
She also claimed to have not been the same person since and told the court that she had to ask her children to carry out tasks for her. Despite the fact that she sued her husband, the woman said that she did not blame him for the accident, instead, she said, the fault lay with the driver of the second car.
Upon being questioned by the defendants solicitor, as to why she had not told doctors that she had previously suffered from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder prior to the accident, the woman said that it must have been because of her level of English.
The defendant’s solicitor told the court that these conditions were the result of the woman witnessing a separate road traffic accident the previous year.
In assessing the case, the judge said that he based his judgement on evidence of the damage to the two cars, both of which seemed to have suffered front-end impacts which didn’t support either drivers contention that the other had been crossing the road when the crash happened.
This was the reason, he said, that he was unable to resolve the case and assessed liability as 50-50 against the woman’s husband and the driver of the other car. The plaintiff was awarded €10,000 as the judge said her complaint was “probably correct”.
" In contentious business, a solicitor may not calculate fees or other charges as a percentage or proportion of any award or settlement."