A HEN night celebration led to a party-goer cutting her right buttock on a collapsing toilet bowl in a West Cork hotel, it was claimed yesterday.
Aileen McCarthy, aged 29, of 287 Connolly Road, Ballyphehane, Cork brought a case for damages against O’Donovan’s hotel, Main Street, Clonakilty.
The injured party, attending a night out for a friend about to get married, denied there had been high jinx or that the women were all wearing ‘bunny ears’.
The accident occurred in the gents’ toilets.
Ms McCarthy testified that she and a friend left the bar of the hotel to go to the toilet and found a long queue outside the ladies. So they went down to the gents, knocked on the door and went in there instead.
Ms McCarthy said she went into the last cubicle, designated for people with disabilities, and sat onto the toilet.
"The right hand side of the toilet bowl collapsed underneath me. I jumped up. I didn’t know what to do. Miriam (the plaintiff’s friend) didn’t want to leave me," Ms McCarthy said. The plaintiff said she could not pull up her trousers because of a cut to her right buttock. She said the manager was called and arrived in the toilet.
"She was not very helpful. She told me to cop myself on," Ms McCarthy testified.
John Lucey barrister for the defendant company TTD Enterprises Ltd, trading as O’Donovan’s Hotel, said the defence would call witnesses that the plaintiff was one of three women standing up on the toilet bowl looking out over the door and shouting at customers.
The plaintiff said that did not happen and what was being described was not physically possible. "We are all short people," she said.
She said the manager did put a plaster on her cut but she later went to a doctor and got two stitches to the wound.
That was on a Friday night and she said a holiday in Italy which commenced the following Sunday was completely ruined by the injury.
The plaintiff testified that when the accident happened she was unable to get through by phone to her friends in the hotel bar so she phoned her husband, who made contact with the others.
Mr Lucey BL said: "You rang from Clonakilty to your husband in Cork to tell your husband ‘I hurt my bottom in a toilet’. What did you want him to do?" The plaintiff replied: "I was hurt and I needed help."
Judge Patrick J Moran rose for a short adjournment before any defence evidence was given.
When he returned to court the plaintiff’s barrister, Tim Bracken, told him the case had settled between the parties. The settlement terms were not disclosed.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, March 20, 2010
