DUBLIN GAA club Kilmacud Crokes is liable for damages caused by flooding to a couple’s home and garden neighbouring the club’s lands, the High Court has ruled.
Nigel and Frances Grennan, Torquay Road, Foxrock, had claimed their garden was repeatedly flooded and their home was also damaged as a result of clearing and compacting of the club’s pitches in 1998. The club denied the flooding was caused by the works carried out.
In a reserved judgment, Mr Justice John MacMenamin ruled the club was liable for the nuisance and negligence caused to the Grennans. The court will assess damages later. He noted the Grennans had maintained an “obdurate insistence” that an expensive underwater tank was the solution to the problem which must inevitably have been “prohibitively expensive” for the club.
Mr Justice MacMenamin said the 1998 works changed the relationship between the two properties when the level of the club’s land was altered. As a result of this, the Grennans suffered their first serious flooding incident during heavy rain in 2000 when water came into the house, causing major damage.
Despite this and a number of other occasions when the garden was flooded, nothing was done by the GAA club for a number of years, the judge said. In 2004, the club built a “berm wall” on its lands to deal with the problem but it was “ineptly constructed”.
The wall was not only substandard but in the wrong place with the effect that the trapped water, and its consequence, were brought far closer to the Grennans’ garden, the judge said.
It was also not in accordance with the specifications set by an engineer engaged by the Grennans. Had it been, it would surely have been a significant step toward ending the problem.
While the berm now acts as something of a dam, creating significant ponding on the club’s lands, there was still subterranean seepage into the Grennans’ garden.
Faced with demands from the Grennans that the problem would only be solved by an underground water storage tank, costing hundreds of thousands, the club’s instinct was to “bury its collective head in the sand,” the judge said.
It was also striking the Grennans themselves had not taken any steps to prevent the flooding by building a retaining wall as one of their neighbours had.
While they were warned by their own engineer they might be liable if such a wall caused flooding in neighbouring gardens, they did not explore other alternatives and this factor must be explored in any hearing on the damages issue, the judge said.
The flooding, even though substantially attenuated after the construction of the berm in 2004, still constituted a disturbance of the Grennans’ property such as would amount to continuing actionable nuisance.
The club behaved unreasonably when it carried out the 1998 works, particularly by failing to have regard to the effect that drainage from the land would have on the Grennans’ property.
It failed to take effective action when problems were brought to its attention and failed to follow its own expert’s specifications in building the berm and continued to do so until the hearing last November, the judge said.