Background
In September 2017, Sophie Drake was prescribed methotrexate — a drug that is contraindicated in pregnancy and is an abortifacient — by staff at South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital for the treatment of psoriasis. Unknown to the prescribing doctors, the plaintiff was pregnant at the time. Within days she was admitted to Cork University Hospital with severe vomiting, where her pregnancy was discovered; she subsequently suffered a spontaneous miscarriage. She became pregnant again in early October 2017, and her daughter, born in July 2018, was diagnosed with periventricular leukomalacia (PVL), a form of brain injury. The plaintiff alleges that both the hospital (which prescribed the drug) and the pharmacy (which dispensed it without proper counselling) were negligent, and that both the miscarriage and her daughter’s brain injury were caused by her ingestion of methotrexate. The first defendant carried out an internal review and, by letter dated 23 July 2018, its solicitors admitted a breach of duty in the manner in which the medication was prescribed.
A personal injury summons was issued on 27 August 2019 on a protective basis to prevent the claim becoming statute-barred, expressly noting it was issued without a medical liability report. The summons expired unserved in August 2020. The plaintiff’s solicitor encountered protracted difficulties obtaining expert evidence on causation of the daughter’s brain injury — including a missed email from a neuroradiologist, repeated failures by Cork University Hospital to furnish the relevant brain scans, restrictions arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, and the departure of the handling solicitor on maternity leave from mid-2021 until she returned on a part-time basis in 2023. An application to renew the summons was not brought until January 2024 and the renewal order was eventually made on 9 December 2024 — more than five years after the summons issued and more than four years after it had expired. The summons was served on both defendants shortly after the renewal order, and each defendant then moved to have the renewal set aside.
The plaintiff argued that the proceedings were intimately connected to the daughter’s injuries (because the plaintiff’s primary claim is for psychiatric injury caused by anxiety about her daughter’s condition), that an expert causation report was therefore necessary before service could responsibly proceed, and that Covid-related delays and staff absence within a small two-person solicitors’ firm constituted special circumstances justifying the renewal. The defendants contended that the alleged excuses did not meet the legal threshold, that Covid restrictions had substantially lifted by mid-to-late 2020, that staff going on maternity leave is an ordinary feature of commercial life, and that the mother’s claim was legally separate from any future claim by the daughter.
The Court’s Holding
Mr Justice Barr applied the single-test framework confirmed by the Supreme Court in Power v CJSC Indigo Tajikistan & Ors [2025] IESC 55, under which the court asks whether, taking all the circumstances of the case into account, there are special circumstances that justify renewal of the summons. The court rejected the defendants’ submission that the question of the daughter’s causation was irrelevant to the plaintiff’s own action: because the plaintiff’s principal claim is for psychiatric injury arising from her daughter’s condition, expert evidence establishing that methotrexate caused the daughter’s brain injury was necessary — not merely desirable — before the plaintiff could responsibly maintain that part of her case. On that point the court sided with the plaintiff.
Nonetheless, the court set aside the renewal of the summons. Applying the principles in Maloney v Lacy Building and Civil Engineering Ltd [2010] 4 IR 417, endorsed in Murphy v HSE [2021] IECA 3 and confirmed in Power, the court held that even where a medical report is necessary, the plaintiff’s solicitor must also establish that he acted with reasonable expedition in obtaining it. Having reviewed the detailed chronology, the court found that the plaintiff’s solicitor had not done so across the more than five years that elapsed before the renewal application was made. Taken cumulatively, the Covid restrictions (which largely lifted by mid-to-late 2020), the maternity leave of one solicitor in the firm, and the difficulties in sourcing experts did not amount to special circumstances sufficient to justify the duration and pattern of delay demonstrated on the facts.
The court expressed genuine sympathy for the plaintiff as a vulnerable person and acknowledged the open admission of breach of duty made by the first defendant, but held that those factors could not cure the procedural deficiency arising from the solicitor’s failure to prosecute the renewal with appropriate diligence. The motions brought by both defendants were therefore granted and the renewal order of 9 December 2024 was set aside.
Key Takeaways
- The Supreme Court’s ruling in Power v CJSC Indigo Tajikistan [2025] IESC 55 replaced the former two-step “gateway” test with a single inquiry: are there special circumstances that justify renewal, assessed in light of all the circumstances?
- A plaintiff’s solicitor may legitimately defer serving a summons while awaiting a medical report that is necessary to justify maintaining the proceedings — but this excuse fails unless the solicitor also demonstrates reasonable expedition in obtaining that report.
- Covid-19 restrictions and an employee’s maternity leave are not automatically special circumstances; each requires concrete evidence of the specific impact on the conduct of the particular file, and neither will excuse delay that extends years beyond the period those disruptions were in force.
- An open admission of breach of duty by a defendant, while relevant to the balance of prejudice, does not by itself justify setting aside an otherwise excessive procedural delay.
- Where a plaintiff’s own psychiatric injury claim is causally dependent on harm suffered by a third party (here, the plaintiff’s daughter), the court will treat expert causation evidence regarding that third party’s injury as necessary to the plaintiff’s own proceedings — not as a collateral matter.
Why It Matters
This decision is a significant application of the new Supreme Court framework for summons renewal in Ireland. It confirms that Power‘s single-test approach does not lower the bar for plaintiffs: necessity of a medical report and the existence of genuine disruptions (pandemic, staffing) are only part of the analysis. Solicitors must demonstrate active and expeditious pursuit of the required evidence throughout the period of delay, and any gap in that effort — particularly one stretching years beyond the expiry of the disruption complained of — will be fatal to a renewal application regardless of the merits of the underlying claim.
The case also clarifies that the interconnection between a parent’s psychiatric injury claim and a child’s physical injuries can render expert evidence on the child’s causation legally necessary to the parent’s proceedings, which has implications for how solicitors should frame and sequence multi-party family medical negligence actions. Practitioners handling complex, multi-limb personal injury cases must ensure that the overall litigation strategy does not inadvertently allow the procedural clock to run unchecked on individual plaintiffs’ summonses while causation evidence for a related claim is assembled.