Pig-headed gardai and compo claim skangers

Picture the scene. Driving along, minding your own business, when you stop close behind the car ahead at a roundabout in Blanchardstown. Suddenly, the occupants of the car notice your proximity, and have a brief chat before emerging to accuse you of back-ending them.

Shocked, you get out and look, but can see no damage to your car or theirs. But you are understandably intimidated as it is a two-on-one situation, and the people involved are quite obviously lacking in honesty and integrity being, as they are, out for a compo claim.

So. Two skangers are shouting the odds, and demanding your insurance details, even though you have not touched them. So rather than give your name and address, you make them up to keep the skangers at bay. Then you leave the scene, shaken, and resolve to report the incident at the Garda station the following morning.

Morning comes, and in you go. You engage the attention of the disinterested copper behind the desk. However, he does not seem to think your case is too important and does not even take down your details. A week or two later, you get a letter from the skangers’ solicitor (the coppers gave them your address) suing you for “injury, emotional distress and trauma”. Loss of earnings are not being sought… draw your own conclusions on that one.

You get in touch with your insurance company and an assessor examines your car and the compo skangers’, before concluding that you are not responsible for any of the numerous bumps and scrapes on their car. You go back to the cop shop to give a statement to one of Templemore’s best. Sadly, she doesn’t seem to be one of the more intelligent ones (it’s all relative), but you point out that the insurance accessor maintains you did not damage their car, and has advised the insurance company not to pay out. This backs up your contention that you never touched the skangers’ car.

So that’s that, you think. Until 10 months later plod knocks at your door to give you a summons for fleeing the scene of an accident. “But there WAS NO ACCIDENT”, you say again. You phone up the insurance company once more, only to discover that the ban Garda (not ban in the English sense, unfortunately, but Gaelic for female I think) has not even bothered her fat arse to contact the insurance company to see their accident report. If she had, she would have seen there was no accident scene to "flee".

The above happened to a friend of mine recently. Now she has to go to the trouble and expense of hiring a solicitor to point out the obvious in a court of law.

Any chance of the coppers pursuing the skangers for making a false-claim?
Not a chance. Too pig-headed you see.

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