A young woman is suing in the High Court seeking damages for injuries suffered when she tripped in a school yard nine years ago.
The High Court heard on Thursday that Amanda Shakira Dinnegan (now aged 19) was racing several of her classmates after the lunchtime bell rang at Loughegar National School in Co Westmeath when she fell, striking her elbow off the tarmac ground.
She fractured her elbow in the May 2015 incident and required two surgeries and four months of physiotherapy.
The court heard the school trustees, through insurer Alliance, deny negligence or liability for her injuries and contend that the then-10-year-old “tripped simply because young girls trip”.
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Ms Dinnegan’s barrister, John Hayden, said she still has a cold sensitivity at her elbow and that her injuries prevented her from playing sports she liked such as boxing, sparring and camogie.
Ms Dinnegan, of Cloghan, Mullingar, Co Westmeath, alleges she was not adequately supervised when she and the other 10-year-olds were allowed to race and that she tripped over defective steel grating.
The court heard Ms Dinnegan initially claimed she fell as a result of an “inadvertent tripping” by one of her classmate competitors. However, she now claims she tripped on steel drainage grating in the yard.
Mr Hayden said an engineer hired by Ms Dinnegan’s legal team inspected the school yard in 2018 and noted the grating protruded some 19 mms above the ground.
Finbarr Fox SC, instructed by Newman solicitors, said the school trustees do not dispute that some grating in the yard was deformed three years after the incident but do not accept there was any defect on the date of the incident.
Adult supervisors present when Ms Dinnegan tripped will tell the court the children were being supervised and the fall occurred “nowhere near the grating”, Mr Fox said.
“This was a youngster running who happened to trip,” he said.
The alteration of the case to include the claims about the grating was “opportunistic”, he added.
The court will next week be shown CCTV footage of what the school trustees say was the incident in question. However, Ms Dinnegan’s lawyers said they do not accept the child in the footage is their client.
Mr Justice Paul Coffey said he may need to see photographs of Ms Dinnegan aged 10 if there is a dispute about the identity of the child in the video.
The hearing has been adjourned to next Tuesday.
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