A woman has told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that she thought a building had fallen on top of her when she was knocked over and trapped by a collapsing bus shelter in the city centre three years ago.
Margaret Fee was giving evidence in the hearing in which Dublin City Council has admitted to breaching provisions of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 1989 arising out of an excavation project.
At the end of yesterday's hearing, Judge Desmond Hogan deferred a decision on what penalty to apply.
Senior engineer Eugene O'Reilly pleaded guilty on behalf of Dublin City Council to failing to take measures to ensure the place was safe by failing to put in place "an adequate exclusion zone" around the excavation works at Lower Mount Street in June 2003.
Insp Tom Murphy of the Health and Safety Authority told Paul Greene, prosecuting, that the council had three District Court convictions for safety breaches, two of which resulted in fatalities.
He accepted that Adshel had constructed the shelter in accordance with planning permission from Dublin Corporation in 1985 which specified that it should be anchored by its own foundation and therefore should not be reliant on the footpath for its stability.
Paul Coffey SC, for the council, told Judge Hogan that this was an unprecedented event which arose out of "a risk that could not easily be foreseeable" and that it did not happen because of deliberate or conscious action taken by the council.
Mr Coffey said there was an assumption that the shelter was adequately supported according to Adshel's own guidelines and there was no suggestion that its collapse was caused by any wrongdoing by the council.
Judge Hogan said he wanted to consider how similar cases had been dealt with in the courts before proceeding to sentence.
Ms Fee, who was working with the Revenue Commissioners at the time, said she was trapped under the bus shelter until passers-by lifted it and waited with her until an ambulance and a fire brigade arrived.
Both her arms were broken and she had significant damage to her kidneys, bowels and liver, with injuries also to her pelvis and abdomen.
Ms Fee said she spent four weeks in intensive care and was not released from hospital until September that year.
Because of complications with her injuries she spent two weeks in intensive care and six months as an in-patient in 2004 and still attended at St Vincent's hospital for surgical, orthopaedic and psychological care.
Ms Fee said she had not been able to return to work and could no longer play pitch and putt or take long walks. She still had numbness in her sides and suffered from depression.
Insp Murphy told Mr Greene that council workers had been removing and replacing flagstones in the vicinity of the bus shelter that day and had put cones around an area surrounding the excavation at 4pm, before leaving the site for the day.
He said the workers had used Kango hammers and pickaxes to remove the concrete from under the flagstones to a depth of six inches and had left a mound of debris in the area. The coning at either end meant that members of the public had to walk into the bus lane to pass by.
Insp Murphy said that the bus shelter was an old version, constructed in June 1985, and consisted of a roof and a back wall and was supported by two cantilever legs which lay underneath the pathway.
It had been secured in place by a foundation of leanmix concrete, a mixture of sand, cement and stone aggregate, below the footpath, along with the flagstone.
Insp Murphy did not accept Mr Coffey's suggestion that the removal of the flagstone would not have affected the shelter and added that the action of the hammer and pickaxes could have destabilised the foundation.