If the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico happened in Irish waters who would be held responsible?

The question is intentionally ambiguous. It seems to refer to a functioning “administration” which would search out culprits and assign blame and punishment. It seems also to refer to the principles by which blame and perhaps punishment would be assigned.

The first aspect might lead to a rant and should be avoided; it is the second aspect to which I refer, and even that can prove contentious. Consequently, I am invoking consideration of the civil law only.

We know that BP is the lead partner in the drilling of the oil well. We know that the partnership hired an oil drilling platform, and crew, from Transocean. It also engaged Halliburton, as engineers, to pump cement slurry into part of the oil well structures to contain oil.

If damage is caused to a third person during a BP-like operation in Ireland, that person would look to the law of negligence and nuisance to found a claim for compensation. The burden of proving negligence would lie on the injured person. It can be anticipated that the BP partnership would plead that it hired competent independent contractors and that, in standard Irish legal principles, it is not liable for damage caused by any negligence of those contractors.
The Plaintiff would, understandably, reject this. Some obligations cannot be delegated, particularly if they are risky. Drilling an oil well under the sea is risky, particularly at a depth of a mile.

The Plaintiff would still have to prove negligence. If the cause of the accident is to remain unknown, the Plaintiff might be in trouble. (In the BP incident, this is the significance of the admission Barack Obama extracted from BP; proof of negligence need not now be addressed by claimants in civil negligence claims against the BP partnership.)

In Ireland, there would be no admission of liability by a Defendant like BP. Faced by the formidable problems in proving liability in negligence, an Irish Plaintiff would look to the law of nuisance for success. Nuisance is a tort of strict liability. A Plaintiff does not need to prove “fault” to win. He simply needs to prove the source of the damage and that the Defendant was the source.

A leaking oil well is a public nuisance. If the oil damages the property of others the Defendant drilling the well is strictly liable.

Proof of loss from such a source would, itself, require to be sophisticated. Proving loss of profit is not easily done, but would be easy in comparison to the obstacles Plaintiffs commonly have to face in Ireland to hold powerful interests to account.

Readers will have seen reference HERE to a plea in a medical negligence case as to the meaning of a “consent” signed by the patient (who was having an operation to make her sterile).

In Fitzpatrick v National Maternity Hospital [2008] IEHC 62 the Defendant claimed that the mother (in labour) declined an episiotomy or a forceps-assisted birth (leading to the damage to the infant). The court rejected this plea, and rejected the evidence of the Defendant, intended to evidence it.

In fact the evidence from the defendant was unequivocal; it alleged the parents had each rejected the offered treatment in circumstances where the staff said…

“…they could not be responsible for the consequences for her or her baby.”

… if the mother did not agree to the proposed actions.

The court said:

“I find on the evidence that Senior Midwife O’Dwyer did not, nor did Dr. Wiza, nor indeed did Staff Midwife Murphy (though on the evidence it was hardly her place to do so given the presence of the others) explain the severity of the plaintiff’s condition to either Mrs. Fitzpatrick or Mr. Fitzpatrick at any time prior to the birth of the plaintiff. I cannot imagine how it could be legitimately stated that this couple were extremely difficult to deal with in labour. I have already found that they were encouraged to and did formulate a birthplan which was given to and discussed with Staff Midwife Murphy on Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s admission to the labour ward, who then brought Senior Midwife O’Dwyer into the discussion.”

Errors of judgment on the probability of an event are usually incorrigible. In short, even evidence that we are wrong will not persuade us that we are wrong in making a judgment as to whether something is or was probable or not. This is a serious problem. If we remain unaffected by evidence we are very unlikely to seek the advice or opinion of a statistician or other expert to help us estimate the probability of an event.

Road traffic accidents are common, but we rarely witness them happening. If we made a judgment of their frequency based on our experience, we would be wrong.

The title to the post is a tongue-in-cheek reference to “law” as in “law blog” and is, generally, a solecism.

The “law” is a reference to a common error. If we see a roulette wheel or some other random generator device favour red five times in sequence, we believe that the chance of it showing black, the alternative, on the next spin is greater than it showing red. For most people, this is a harmless error, excepting compulsive gamblers and property developers.

The courts, however, engage in exactly this exercise when they decide if something was or was not foreseeable. Clearly, evidence that something is common will secure a judgment that it was foreseeable, but an absence of evidence of the frequency of an event is not itself a basis to infer the frequency of an event; it is evidence of its being overlooked. The overlooking may be by the parties to litigation, or their lawyers, or it may be by the State or statisticians generally.

What is the likelihood of suffering injury from systemic failure in the Irish health system? Not very high, but not a remote possibility either.

We should remember what the statistics from the Personal injuries Assessment Board show us; Road Traffic Accidents are the major source by far of personal injury in Ireland. Even though PIAB does not assess medical negligence claims, such claims would never exceed the Road Traffic claims in frequency.

For more information see our Colour Supplement HERE

1. It was (arguably) beyond the remit of the High Court inspector to make exhaustive comment on the giving of legal advice to Mr. Jim Flavin (“Flavin”) on the legality of the sale by Flavin of Fyffes’ shares.

2. However, the advice was wrong, the inspector says. (He could hardly say anything else, given that the Supreme Court effectively said the same thing).

3. Consequently, the question as to whether the solicitor who gave that advice was negligent could arise. Hopefully, the solicitor knew this and qualified the advice with the use of some formulation like “…on the one hand this… on the other hand that…”.

4. But then Flavin would have been in a quandary. He would not have been able to sleep with worry about the possibility that he was about to commit a crime.

5. But what of the solicitor? Is his sleep of no consequence? If he says, positively, that the sale of shares is legal; is not a crime, and is nonetheless wrong, is he not liable to the client? How can he sleep with the worry that his advice will prove to be wrong?

6. Even if he has nerves of steel and a will of iron, what can he say to the client who returns to him after the trauma of even a successful defence of the client’s actions? Did he not advise the client of the possibility, indeed the likelihood of litigation? If he did, surely the client had grounds to doubt the legality of what was proposed and if he did not surely the client, learning of the decision in C. W. Dixey and Sons Ltd. v Parsons [1964]192 E G where the court said;

“In the present circumstances the solicitor owed a duty of care to his client to take reasonable care, not only to protect his client against committing a breach of the law but to protect him against the risk of being involved in litigation… It would not do for him to say that in his view it was all right. There was an obvious danger that a different view might be taken. In the present circumstances the ordinary careful solicitor would have gone to see his clients and advised them not to sign.”

would be rightly aggrieved at the advice the solicitor had given.

7. Of course, there is another way of seeing the situation. There are some things upon which a solicitor should not venture an opinion or advice and clients should not seek such opinion or advice.

Judge McMahon travelled to Lissadell to see the subject of the dispute between the owners and Sligo County Council about “public rights of way” on the estate.

From an evidential point of view this is equivalent to looking at the murder weapon in a criminal trial, or looking at a large machine which cannot be brought to court with convenience.

It is normal for the parties to the dispute to be given the opportunity to accompany the judge (or the jury, as the case may be) with legal advisors in the “viewing” by the finder of fact.

The reason for this is to ensure the adoption of fair procedures and to preclude the possibility of some novel (and irrelevant) element, unseen and unknown by, and to, the parties colouring the judge’s perception and opinion.

As this is written, the public perception of AIB and Bank of Ireland is that they are solvent. They may not be. If they are not, the Government, or part of it, knows it. The Government, although it is silent on the point, is in that case, in effect. perpetuating the illusion of the banks’ solvency. This split between what is officially the case and what is really the case is common. We have seen recently that, although they were not directly protected by the State, we slowly, and by chance, learned that Liam Carroll’s property interests were financially unsustainable with Paddy Kelly’s likewise, followed by Bernard McNamara’s. These truths, easily comprehended when brought to view, are part of the more obscure greater truth, that the crash of these property interests was facilitated by massive Government failures and that the possible insolvency of the banks was caused by the Government.

The recent apology from the British Government to the victims of the Thalidomide scandal reminds us of what is required when important issues are denied or ignored; quality journalists.

In the UK they had the Sunday Times “Insight” team under Harold Evans. As editor of the Sunday Times, Evans refused to knuckle under in the face of Distillers’ court injunction preventing the newspaper from publishing the truth (to the extent then known) about the cause and history of the dreadful birth defects that had appeared as a result of the use of the Thalidomide drug by women. (Distillers was the distributor of Thalidomide).

(Ironically, given the title to this post, a newspaper of the name “Sunday Times” continued to exist after Harold Evans left it, but it was not what it had been; Rupert Murdoch owned it then).

At the crucial time and on the central issue, openness, the UK courts came down emphatically on the side of Distillers and attempted to impose secrecy.

Here in Ireland, if there were to be a reprise of that struggle we can not be sure that the courts’ response might not be equally inadequate.

The reasons for this are twofold; access to public records is still regularly denied as a consistent Government policy, and, within the court system, access to paper and electronic records is a matter of chance and whim. The Government has not only set the policy of “closed” administration, it has written the legislation to make it legal to refuse access to public records.

There has been general astonishment at the findings of the High Court inspector into the “Fyffes” and “DCC” insider dealing transactions.

The inspector found that, Mr. Jim Flavin, having received legal advice, broke the law as to insider dealing, but, in the light of the advice, did so inadvertently.

Oddly, the judge who appointed the inspector to conduct the investigation said, in making the appointment:

The earlier proceedings were concerned only with the civil law and did not have to address culpability or responsibility of persons who may have advised or planned the transactions.”

How did that interesting idea fall by the wayside, as it appears to have done?

It is an obligation of an advocate, in cross-examination, to convey to the witness the evidence the advocate intends to adduce to rebut the evidence of the witness. This is called “putting” the case to the witness. The witness will have the presumed opportunity to comment on the “case” of the advocate’s witnesses.

The potential penalty for failure by the advocate to do this is a prohibition by the court on the advocate adducing evidence contradictory of the witness’ evidence. In fact, the advocate will, in such circumstances, concede the failure and ask for leave to, belatedly, “put” the case to the witness or witnesses. This may not be convenient (it usually is not) and may be impossible. It will certainly cost money. The cost will be met by the advocate’s client. The court ensures this by permitting the witness to return, conditional on the advocate consenting to an order against his/her client on the costs.

There are often matters on which the advocate has no evidence to present in rebuttal. That does not preclude the advocate from seeking to challenge the witness on the point or points. However, the advocate is not permitted to leave the witness under the mistaken impression that the challenge is the “putting” of the advocate’s case. To avoid this, the advocate “suggests” to the witness that “…………….”. This formulation is a signal to the witness that the advocate is asking the witness to agree or disagree with the advocate and that the advocate is not going to call rebuttal evidence.

The Courts belong to the public world. The speech (and writing) of the courts is public speech and public writing.

Consequently, we in our office occasionally nominate the late Conor Cruise O’Brien as our preferred witness (on any topic, in any case).

He excelled at public speech and writing. He was wonderfully combative and would not suffer fools gladly. In short, he would have made mincemeat of most counsellors. (That’s a good US word to describe a “trial lawyer”).

His gifts were self confidence and familiarity with the public world. Most witnesses lack both to some degree, especially the latter. They are vulnerable, consequently, to mendacious forms of cross-examination.

Conor Cruise O’Brien himself demonstrates this to some degree. He remarked that he recognised his enemies by their approbation of the ideas of Rousseau. This was a harsh standard. Few people know the source or sources of the ideas they use to prop up their speech, not to speak of their lives. To take everything they might say as defining them perfectly is just wrong. To challenge them to defend the propositions inherent in their speech is also, generally, unfair. After all, Rousseau, among other things, undermined the “Ancien Regime”; he pointed to the fact that social conditions were the product of bad government, not the fault of the populace in misery. These opinions would not generally be considered contentious now (among Social Democrats, anyway). Likewise, they are not rebutted by being paraded for inspection with some other doctrine of Rousseau’s, now, perhaps, considered indefensible.

What is the defining characteristic of real troublemakers is their failure to allude to any form of idea in their speech or writing. They seek instead to give the impression that they are simply representative of a general current view, undefined.

They speak in terms of the title to this post.

It is surprising how often the willfulness of lawyers or litigants drives litigation, rather than evidence. We see an instance of this in the “theory” that William Shakespeare did not write the “Shakespearean canon” and that the plays and poems were written by, among others, Francis Bacon. This theory was first advanced by Delia Bacon in a book published in 1857.

The essential element of the book, in explaining its success, was prolixity. A work is prolix if it is too long. It is a general human failing to think that there must be substance to something if it can be written about at length.

At any length, Ms. Bacon’s book was too long.

In this vein, some solicitors and some barristers stand out for an inability to produce short affidavits. They talk all around the problem, avoiding the terms in which the opponent has defined the issues. This may be very good in principle, but it is tiresome in practice and oppressive when the prolix affidavit is sworn in the cause of big institutions, for, in truth, this is a feature of struggles with big institutions; they try to talk the problem away.