A Co Wicklow mother, who claimed a pharmacy allowed her husband to watch CCTV footage of her buying a pregnancy test kit, has settled a €38,000 damages claim against the pharmacy for an undisclosed sum.
The woman, who cannot be named by order of the
judge in the Circuit Civil Court, said her marriage had been highly
dysfunctional and difficult for a number of years before the October 2010
incident. The incident, she said, worsened her relationship with her now
deceased husband.
She told her barrister Martina O’Neill that she
had bought the pregnancy test for a friend, but her husband found the receipt
in their home and went to the pharmacy with it.
The court heard the husband was very possessive
and had displayed abusive and violent behaviour towards his wife. When he
arrived at the pharmacy he pretended to be very distressed and “tricked” one of
the employees into showing him CCTV coverage of the actual purchase.
The husband told the pharmacy employee he had
found the receipt in his teenage daughter’s bedroom and was concerned that she
was sexually active. This had been why he had asked to be shown CCTV footage.
When asked by counsel for the pharmacy if her
husband could have played “a low trick” on the employee, the woman said she
could see him playing such a role as he would have been very good at it.
Mr English told the court the pharmacy assistant
was very concerned for the wellbeing of the man’s teenage daughter and, due to
his agitated state, showed him CCTV footage of a woman purchasing the test.
Circuit Court president Mr Justice Raymond
Groarke was told that the father, who had identified the woman as
being his daughter’s aunt, had secretly taken pictures of the CCTV footage with
his mobile phone. The court heard the woman in the video was, in fact, the
girl’s mother and plaintiff in the court proceedings.
The mother told the court she and her husband
were not having an intimate relationship at the time and this had led to a row
with her husband as he thought she had bought the test for herself.
She said her husband sent her, on her own mobile
phone, a picture of her purchasing the pregnancy test. She had been scared about
going home as she knew he would use it to start a row.
The woman told the judge that her husband and
she had separated on and off. He had been physically and mentally abusive
towards her. Gardaí had intervened several times after being called by the couple’s
children.
The court heard the incident had not made their
“traumatic marriage” any better as the husband had used the pregnancy test
purchase as “a stick to beat her with” and made her life a misery.
“Every day after that he would talk about it any
chance he could get. He became abusive on a daily basis,” she told the court.
She suffered acute stress and depression and had
needed to obtain counselling and medication.
The woman said she had complained to the then
Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, who had found there had been a
breach of the Data Protection laws.
The mother had afterwards issued the court
proceedings in which she sued the pharmacy under the Data Protection Act for
negligence and breach of duty in allowing the footage to be shown to the
father.
Mr English told Judge Groarke that if the father
had taken photographs of a computer screen, he had done so without the
pharmacy’s consent and the pharmacy fully contested the mother’s claim.
Counsel said the act allowed for personal data
to be given to a third party if it was required urgently to protect someone’s
health. He said the father had been highly agitated and distressed.
Following a brief adjournment to allow talks
between the parties, Ms O’Neill said the matter had resolved. The judge, who
had earlier refused an application by Ms O’Neill for the case to be heard in
camera but had made an order restraining identity of any of the parties, struck
out the case
