In JUST one day recently Dublin courts gave clear evidence of how the litigation industry is the fastest growing of all in Ireland's booming economy. A nurse with back injuries who had knowingly departed from the requisite procedures for lifting patients was awarded £100,000 damages in the High Court against the Southern Health Board. Another woman, who had been cut near her lip by the handle of a stapler, causing a minute scar which, said the judge, "could only be seen in certain circumstances", was awarded £8,900 damages.
And a driver who had suffered a "minor to moderate" whiplash injury in an accident which was so slight that no damage had been caused to either car received £7,500 compensation.
Judges impose the law as they find it, and these judges were no doubt sound in law and in judgment in their awards: but what folly it is all turning out to be. For no health board can ensure the rules for turning patients are enforced at all times: yet the judge found the Southern Health Board two-thirds liable for injuries caused by a nurse's purely voluntary departures from the rules.
And now the prospect looms of every nurse or former nurse who has an iffy back doing a PDFORRA on the State, opening up a vista of truly Denningesque proportions.
The Army deafness claims, even by bandsmen, have been joined by others. Soldiers who contracted food poisoning after freely attending a barbecue sued the State and won. So too did a soldier who sought £30,000 after slipping and cutting his head slightly while getting into a machine-gun emplacement in the Lebanon. Even though the trial judge declared the litigant had "exaggerated and enhanced" his evidence, he awarded him £2,500.
We are rapidly approaching the point where soldiers cannot soldier and nurses cannot nurse without suing those who allowed them follow the careers of their choice. Who is responsible for this extraordinary trend? Our law-makers? Our lawyers? Is it simple popular greed? Or does our membership of the Anglo-American popular culture make us simply incapable of repelling the magnetic pull of litigiousness victimhood?
Don't blame us, say the lawyers. The former Attorney General, Harry Whelehan, told the Irish Medical Organisation last April that the legal profession was innocent of blame for the growth of litigation against doctors, declaring that lawyers did not sign documents to initiate proceedings unless it was proven prima facie to them that injury had occurred and loss ensued.
What? Never? Such innocence of human nature is touching indeed in one so successful in perhaps the least innocent of all professions.
However, Mr Whelehan's criticisms of the medical profession are sometimes justified. A Donegal woman who had an inflammation of the womb was given a wholly unnecessary operation for a non-existed ovarian cyst, causing permanent scarring. She sued and was awarded £35,000 damages: surely not exorbitant.
Yet such appropriate cases in the US have opened the floodgates of litigation so wide that many doctors, fearing lawsuits in the event of failure to cure, now prefer to treat the healthy only; in such a world, the hypochondriac well-but-worried is an ideal patient.
Very occasionally stowaways aboard the compensation express are found out. One such was Ann McDonagh of Tallaght, who claimed she been injured in a fall at a bingo session. She had her day in court last May, and a very disagreeable day it was too.
The judge described her claim as blatantly dishonest, shameless and bogus, and said she had lied to her legal team and under oath in the witness-box. "You have a history of previous claims and a selective inability to remember them until confronted with the facts."
Here was a case of clear perjury and false claims begging for appropriate punishment, yet the record indicates that she was allowed to walk free. If courts do not fall upon litigant malefactors with vengeful fury, what is to prevent a mass of opportunistic cases filling the courts? Certainly not the insurance industry, it seems, which in the US has stoked the fires of victimhood culture by its anxiety to fight cases in courts.
AS THERE, now here. The most disturbing case recently concerned a publican and his wife. The latter drove a customer back to his car. Instead of going home, the man continued drinking, and 21/2 hours later drove into a wall, breaking his neck. He sued the couple who had done their best to get him home, and against their wishes, their insurance company agreed a £100,000 settlement.
However, some courts are developing a welcome scepticism. A teenage soccer fan who said he had been so traumatised at witnessing the Lansdowne Road riot three years ago that he feels he might never again attend a soccer match was last month denied the right to sue the Football Association of Ireland in the High Court, where damages are unlimited, rather than in the Circuit Court, where they are limited to £30,000.
If merely witnessing a riot can lead to compensation, many people throughout Ireland might feel their hour of compensation is nigh. Certainly, the four policemen who witnessed the truly appalling events at Hillsborough nearly 10 years ago and who sued their own police force for their ensuing distress were initially awarded compensation.
In a landmark ruling earlier this month, the British law lords decided otherwise, and in words which might be repeated whenever this issue of compensation arises.
To compensate those police officers would offend against an ordinary person's notion of justice, said one law lord. Another ruled that in an ideal world everyone who had suffered in the tragedy would be compensated.
"But we do not live in Utopia; we live in a practical world," he added. In other words, at the highest level, common law finally resorted to common sense; and upon the rocks of common sense the plague vessel of compensation culture might one day founder.
