Dublinfootballfanis awarded£2,500

March 1988

A Dublin man who injured his hand while attending a football match at Wexford GAA Park three years ago was awarded £2,500 by Judge Diarmuid Sheridan at Wexford Circuit Court.

[NAME WITHELD], Summerhill, Dublin, said he received four stitches to his hand after falling from a grass embankment onto discarded rubbish that included broken glass bottles. He denied that he had cut his hand on glass on top of a wall when he was trying to climb in to the match for free.

The claimant told the court that he entered the grounds for the Wexford v Dublin match and went up a grass embankment behind the goal. He saw a that number of others outside the ground were getting in over the wall with a ladder they had taken from a nearby van. A Garda arrived on the scene and started chasing one of these men.

The crowd began to cheer and move forward to get a better view of this. Claimant said that in the push, he fell down the embankment, onto an area where there was collection of broken glass, rubble, and tin cans. He cut his hand and was taken to hospital for treatment.

He gave evidence that three years later, he still experiences numbness and a stinging sensation in that hand.

Lawrence Pierce, an architect who appeared as an expert witness, told Judge Sheridan that he was of the view that viewing conditions at the ground were inadequate. The embankment was uneven and littered with debris. There were no crowd control barriers, and there was no handrail or barrier to prevent someone toppling over. The overall condition of the embankment was that ‘it looked like a tiphead’. It would not take a lot to improve it, and the cost ‘would not be astronomical’, he said.

In awarding a claim against Wexford GAA, Judge Sheridan commented that it would be wrong to visit too much responsibility on the defendants.

He said they could be responsible only for any danger they could reasonably foresee, and this could not include a crowd surge to try see a Garda chasing a man who used a ladder to hop in for free.

They were responsible however for the load of rubbish at the bottom of the embankment, which could easily have been taken away, particularly when such a large attendance had been expected for the game.

He awarded damages of £2,500.