After years of waiting for a day that appeared doubtful for a long time, Ruairí McGrath waited outside the High Court in the kind of afternoon sunshine that seemed a little strange. He claimed that it had been a five-year battle. His daughter’s world was now open to her, he remarked. “The sky was the limit,” he added. It didn’t sound exaggerated. It sounded like someone who had just put down something heavy that they had been carrying for a long time.
On May 20, 2016, Olivia McGrath was born at Cork University Maternity Hospital. At the age of ten, she is mute. Her vision is poor. She needs round-the-clock, full-time care and uses a wheelchair. The focus of the lawsuit, which was filed through her father against the HSE, was the circumstances surrounding that birth, particularly whether a Caesarean section ought to have been carried out sooner rather than later and whether warning indicators in the monitoring data were appropriately interpreted and promptly addressed.
It took five years to navigate the complex narrative given in court by the medical details. The family’s legal team contended that irregular readings from the CTG trace, a device that tracks a baby’s heart rate during labor, should have been taken seriously. They maintained that a baby who was already little and had less amniotic fluid needed more care during labor management and that the trace was seen but not addressed. They contended that the Caesarean should have been performed earlier.
The time of Olivia’s stroke was a different and hotly debated topic. The McGrath side maintained that the stroke occurred during childbirth and that she would have been safeguarded by an earlier operation. A different timetable was provided by an HSE specialist, who said that the stroke had probably happened weeks before labor started.
These conflicting expert opinions are an example of the kind of medical dispute that would have taken six weeks in court and needed a judge to balance one set of highly qualified opinions against another if the case had gone to a full hearing instead of mediation.
The settlement is an interim payment of €3.25 million, which is equivalent to 55% of the claim’s total assessed value. In Irish personal injury lawsuits involving children with continuing complicated care needs, that structure is not uncommon. When Olivia is older and her future care needs can be more accurately determined, the remaining value will be reinstated.
The HSE reached a settlement without acknowledging any wrongdoing. That is also the norm. The fact that the parties settled their disagreement through mediation rather than waiting for a judge to determine who was correct does not imply that the accusations were found to be unfounded.
In approving the settlement, Judge Paul Coffey said he was satisfied with the outcome’s fairness and reasonableness and described the case as extremely complex. In cases involving minors, judicial approval is important since it is a substantive evaluation of whether the conditions negotiated have adequately served the child’s interests rather than a rubber stamp.
