A 19-year-old student whose photo as a nine-year-old girl splashing about in a swimming pool in Greece was used in a holiday brochure has sued Falcon Holidays for more than €38,000 damages.
Siobháin Murray, of Abbey Park, Baldoyle, Co Dublin, broke down in the Circuit Civil Court yesterday as she recalled "the pain" of having been mocked at school by pupils who taunted her about "topless modelling".
She told Judge Jacqueline Linnane she still vividly recalled the day in June 1995 when a photographer waved and whistled to her and two other pals as they frolicked on a lilo in the pool at a hotel resort on the island of Kos.
She said she then saw the man hunker down and point a zoom lens at them through the railings around the hotel.
She told her counsel, Margaret Quinn, she thought nothing more of it until one day in school in 2000 when some girls in her class told her they had seen her in a holiday brochure.
"They said, 'You think you are a model' and 'You are too fat and too ugly to be a model'," Ms Murray said.
She said she had not been wearing her top and they had compared her to a semi-naked woman on a lilo. She had been embarrassed and angry and dreaded going to school.
She told Ronan Dolan, counsel for Falcon, that the photograph in itself was perfectly wholesome and depicted smiling children enjoying themselves in the pool. There was nothing humiliating or embarrassing in the picture.
"I was teased by girls about not having a top on. They said an awful lot of awful stuff to me and gave me abuse about it," she said. "Every time I think about it I relive the past. I went through a lot of pain personally about what they said to me. They hurt me."
Ms Quinn said Ms Murray was suing First Choice Holidays and Flights Ltd, which trades as Falcon Holidays, for breach of duty, contract, privacy, confidence and constitutional rights.
Citing law in the successful Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones claim against Hello magazine, she said it too had been a case where photographs had been taken surreptitiously and subsequently published in a rival publication.
Mr Dolan told the court that while the lack of parental permission for the taking of the photograph may have been regrettable, it was not legally actionable.
Photographs could be taken of people without their permission.
Judge Linnane reserved judgment.