Widow loses fight for €795k damages payout

A woman rearing her family on a widow’s pension since her husband was killed in a workplace accident 14 years ago has failed in a bid to have a €795,000 damages award paid out to her under the State-backed Insurance Compensation Fund.

Mr Justice Gerard Hogan, in refusing the application of Helen Guiney, of Sean Moylan Park, Kiskeam, Mallow, Co Cork, said he had reached his conclusion with the “deepest possible personal regrets”.

The judge said Ms Guiney’s moral claim to compensation was, as a matter of abstract justice, quite unanswerable.

However, he said that, “unpalatable and unsatisfactory as it may be”, he was bound by what he considered to be the correct interpretation of the relevant statutory provisions and regulations he had outlined in his reserved judgment.

Ms Guiney’s husband John died as a result of an accident on a construction site in Raheen, Carrigaline, Cork, in November 2000.

She sued her husband’s then-employer and, in 2012, was awarded damages of €794,765 by Ms Justice Mary Irvine against MJ Manning Construction Ltd, which had since ceased trading.

Judge Hogan yesterday said the construction company was, unfortunately, not in a position to satisfy the judgment and, to compound all the difficulties, the company’s insurers, the Independent Insurance Company Ltd, a British company, was itself in liquidation.

He said the liquidators of Independent Insurance had told the court it seemed unlikely Ms Guiney would receive anything more than 10%-15% of the ultimate award (perhaps less than €80,000) on a distribution of the liquidation.

The Insurance Compensation Fund is run by the accountant of the Courts of Justice under the control of the President of the High Court.

In May 2013, an application to the fund for the payout of damages was refused because the policy MJ Manning held with Independent Insurance was not captured by the fund due to a legislative amendment in 2011 of the Insurance Act.

This refusal had been challenged before him.

Ms Guiney was not entitled to claim on the British Financial Services Compensation Scheme as the death of her husband had occurred in Ireland.

Judge Hogan said Ms Guiney had been left to fend for herself and two very young children and it was to her enormous credit that she had managed to do this in difficult financial circumstances following terrible personal tragedy.

“Judged from the perspective of abstract justice, fairness and morality, Ms Guiney’s claim to be paid compensation some 14 years after this terrible tragedy is an absolutely compelling and overwhelming one,” said Judge Hogan.

“This court is, however, obliged to deal with the imperfect world of human justice, so that her entitlement is regulated by law and in this instance by a complex web of inter-locking statutory provisions, amendments, substitutions and statutory instruments.”

Judge Hogan said he found himself compelled to find against Ms Guiney so far as the issue of statutory interpretation of the Act was concerned.

He invited the parties to consider how the balance of the case, dealing with arguments based on EU law, could be dealt with as quickly as possible.