The law file clerk who took on an energy giant... and won

ERIN Brockovich grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, the youngest child of an industrial engineer and a journalist.

She was hired as a file clerk by the Southern California-based law firm Masry and Vititoe. It was while filing papers in an ordinary property case that she came across medical records that caught her eye.

She began to research the matter and her investigations eventually established that the health of hundreds of people who lived in and around Hinkley, California, in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, had been severely compromised by exposure to toxic chromium 6 — levels of which have been found on the site of the former Irish Steel plant on Haulbowline Island in Cork Harbour.