It was Sunday night, April 30th, 1995. Donna Keating had gone out for a drink with two friends to O'Reilly's Pub on George's Quay in Dublin. She stayed for just over two hours, having three glasses of Smithwicks before setting off, at about 11.30p.m., on the short journey home to Pearse House, just five minutes away.
As she walked along Luke Street she stopped to adjust a buckle on her boot and then, according to her version of events, fell into a pothole on the street. Her friends rushed back to pick her up and an ambulance was called to take her to the Meath Hospital.
There she was found to have suffered a severe ankle injury. She had broken her tibia and fibula and had suffered severe damage to the nerves around her bones.
Ms Keating, a mother of four, instigated a claim for substantial damages against Dublin Corporation. It seemed like a clear-cut case.
But this week the High Court ruled against her, awarding costs, estimated to be between £12,000 and £15,000, to Dublin Corporation. Mr Justice Quirke said he did not believe, as a matter of probability, that she had fallen into the hole she identified.
The ruling is the latest victory for a little-known office established by the Corporation in 1995 with the sole purpose of investigating the background of claimants in compensation cases. The investigations unit spent more than two years working on Ms Keating's case, building up evidence of a substantial number of claims by certain relatives and associates over a number of years.
"It is virtually impossible to prove that a case is fraudulent," said a spokesman for the unit, the members of which do not wish to make their names public.
"The way we attack suspicious claims is on the credibility of witnesses and of evidence. If people have lied in their dealings with the Corporation, for example, by claiming loss of income from an injury while on social welfare, we will raise that in court."
A certain degree of secrecy surrounds the workings of the unit. In some cases, private investigators are employed to compile evidence on the validity of an alleged injury.
In all cases, the claimant's history is checked with an insurance link service which, shared by all the major insurance companies and State-sponsored bodies, has more than half a million claims on record.
In the case of Ms Keating, the Corporation uncovered links with almost 30 claims made by associates or relatives. The total amount of damages received within the circle of friends ran into the high six figures.
The trail began with Ms Keating who, under her married name, Donna Tobin, had been involved in an insurance claim arising from a road traffic accident at Harold's Cross Bridge, Dublin, on September 3rd, 1987. After suffering whiplash injuries, she received damages believed to be in the region of £9,000.
In the same car were her husband, Francis, and her mother, Ms Esther Keating, both of whom received similar damages.
That was the first of four claims made by Mr Tobin in the space of three years. Two were against Dublin Corporation for "trip and fall" incidents at Pearse Street and Auburn Street in 1990. The other arose out of an alleged back injury suffered at the Mater Hospital in 1989.
All three cases fell apart, however, when the last claim came before the High Court in February 1992. Under cross-examination, Mr Tobin admitted defrauding social welfare over a five-year period and subsequently dropped the case. The two pending claims against the Corporation were also discontinued.
At this week's hearing, Ms Keating had tried to distance herself from her husband's claims history and said the two had been separated for several years. However, further links to compensation claims had yet to be revealed.
The claimant's sister-in-law, Ms Mandy Keating, who was a witness in the case, had been involved in two previous claims under her maiden name, Mandy Forbes.
One was a defamation claim against Dunnes Stores relating to an incident in 1989. The other arose from a motoring incident at Temple Road in Dartry on October 14th, 1990.
The car involved had numerous passengers on board, all of whom initiated personal injury claims after it drove into a pothole.
The case was dropped after an RTE documentary team interviewed witnesses who said they saw the car driving slowly and deliberately into the pothole. In the High Court this week, Ms Mandy Keating said she could not remember why the claim was not pursued.
Other motor insurance claims had been made by two of Mr Tobin's aunts, Ms Anne Oglesby and Ms Rita Boyne. They were both injured in an accident at Townsend Street in October 1989.
They had previously won personal injury claims against the Corporation when both fell simultaneously into the same hole in a pavement at Pearse House. Ms Oglesby was awarded £100. Ms Boyne was found 80 per cent negligent and awarded £160.
Meanwhile Ms Boyne's daughter, Marie, received £7,500 in damages from the Corporation after falling on the stairs at her home at Conway Court, adjacent to Pearse House, in November 1992.
Further claims were traced to Ms Mandy Keating, nee Forbes. Her mother, Kathleen, made a whiplash claim against CIE for an incident in April 1993. Her father, Philip, made two personal injury claims against Bord Gais, one of which was dismissed with costs awarded against him.
Her sister, Pamela Forbes, made a personal injury claim arising from a road accident in May 1993. A cousin, Ms Elaine Roche, had been a passenger in the Temple Road incident and had minor property damage claims against the Corporation.
Links to four more claims associated with the Roche family were detailed in court before Mr Justice Quirke called a halt, not to the Corporation's evidence but merely to that line of inquiry.
The Corporation had been saving perhaps its most damning piece of evidence: a photograph of a football team of 13 players, eight of whom had been involved in claims.
In the centre of the picture was the claimant's brother and Ms Mandy Keating's husband, Mr Stephen Keating. Above him was one of Ms Esther Keating's cousins, Stephen "Rossi" Walsh, who is serving a 15-year prison sentence for blowing up a Dublin pub in September 1992.
Before he was charged with that crime, Mr Walsh had been identified by Judge Frank Martin as the "malign name" behind an insurance scam involving a "dial-a-witness" service.
Among the other team members was a man with a personal injury claim against the Corporation for a "trip and fall" incident in February 1990. Another team member acted as a witness in the case, which was thrown out by Judge Martin, who awarded costs to the Corporation and referred a file on the claimant to the DPP.
Four other men had been involved in personal injury claims arising from road accidents, one of them against Bord Gais. Among them was the driver of the car in the Temple Road incident.
Other members of the team had claimed for personal injuries against Dublin Corporation or had acted as witnesses in other compensation cases.
According to the Corporation's investigation unit, this week's case was "a landmark in that the judge asked for us to give all the evidence. We have had other cases where better information was available to us, but it was not allowed to be given in court."
During the hearing Mr Justice Quirke, who as a Senior Counsel had specialised in personal injury cases, said that he was not "prepared to make a decision with a blindfold on". He wanted to know if the court was being used as a vehicle for fraud.
Despite the success, however, the Corporation recognises it has a long way to go before winning the compensation war. Compensation claims still account for one-quarter of the authority's discretionary income.
The damages bill last year was £7.2 million, a substantial increase on the previous year, largely due to the clearance of a backlog of about 300 cases. The bill fell in 1996 to £5.5 million from £6 million in 1995.
"People are realising the Corporation is no longer a soft target," said Mr Michael Redmond, the city treasurer. "We are winning more cases and settling more cases out of court for less."
The Corporation has also adopted a more vigorous approach to recouping costs from its often expensive investigations.
In the case of Donna Keating, the source of whose injuries remains a mystery, it has pledged to pursue costs "to the point of seeking a committal order for imprisonment".
