Woman sues nightclub over stair fall – they blame ‘high heels’
A WOMAN who broke her wrist after falling on the stairs in a top Dublin nightclub was wearing an inappropriate choice of footwear, the High Court will hear.
Rachael Sheridan tripped after the heel of her slingback shoe got caught in a loose metal strip and she fell down a set of steps in Dublin city centre’s Lillie’s Bordello.
The 39-year-old accounts manager is suing the owners of the nightclub, and her counsel told the High Court that Noyfield Ltd, trading as Lillie’s Bordello, will argue that Ms Sheridan was partly to blame as she was wearing the wrong footwear.
Yesterday, Mr Justice Michael Hanna noted that the slingbacks Ms Sheridan wore on the night of May 19, 2013, ‘seemed to be a perfectly regular pair of high heel shoes’, adding: ‘They are not a pair of stilts or anything like that. They are high heels like you regularly see not only in nightclubs but walking up and down the corridors of these courts’.
Ms Sheridan, from Arbour Hill in Dublin 7, told the court there was no handrail on the flight of six steps, and that she fell, breaking her wrist.
The defendants have denied any liability or negligence for the accident, which occurred at around 3am on May 19, 2013.
The plaintiff ’s counsel, Michael Mulcahy SC, said Lillie’s had claimed that Ms Sheridan, who had gone out dancing with three of her friends, was partly to blame as she was wearing inappropriate footwear.
‘And they claim that she had consumed sufficient alcohol so as to impair her ability to negotiate stairs,’ he added.
Ms Sheridan told the court she’d had a couple of glasses of wine at her home where she had cooked a dinner for herself and a friend. They met two more women friends at the Exchequer bar in the city centre, where she had a bottle of beer, and later moved on to Lillie’s at around 12.20am, the court heard. She had a couple of drinks there, she said. Her fall came as she was about to leave, having just gone up the same set of stairs to try to find her friends to say goodbye.
Ms Sheridan said: ‘I turned to go back down and my heel caught. And I fell outstretched to the ground at the bottom of the stairs... It all happened very fast, obviously.’
She continued: ‘I was in immediate pain, in my left wrist, and I felt panicked because when I looked at my wrist, it immediately looked disfigured. I could see the skin wasn’t broken, but I could see the bones protruding under the skin.’
Ms Sheridan said a staff member came over very quickly, and told her that her wrist wasn’t broken, just sprained. She refused an offer of an ambulance, as she was afraid to go alone, she said. The staff helped her to a taxi, but told her to stop crying or a driver would not carry her, she added.
When she got home, she called her sister and went to Beaumont Hospital. An X-ray revealed fractures in two wrist bones, and she underwent surgery that day to fix the break. Regarding the claim that she was drunk at the time of her fall, she told her counsel: ‘I was well within my faculties.’ She also said she could not understand criticism of her shoe choice.
Mr Mulcahy said the plaintiff ’s engineering evidence would be that the piece of metal which held the carpet down onto the stair was defective.
In addition, the stairs were not of equal height, which he said was against building regulations. And he said the lack of a handrail to break or prevent a fall was ‘dangerous and considerably negligent in itself ’.
He said the injury had reduced Ms Sheridan’s independence and caused her a loss of opportunity in her career. The case continues.
Shoes ‘seemed perfectly regular’