Passenger who spilled a hot cup of tea on herself during a Ryanair flight is awarded £8,880 in damages

A FEMALE passenger who burned herself with a cup of tea on a Ryanair flight has been awarded €10,500 (£8,880) in damages.

Grainne Dunworth scalded herself on the hot drink while flying from Prague to Dublin in January last year.

The 27-year-old from Kilmihil, Ballingarry, Co. Limerick, claimed that the flight attendant who served her had not properly secured the lid and that it popped off when she lifted it.

The shock of the lid coming off then caused her to drop the drink, and the hot water burned her stomach and right thigh.

After suffering intense pain and shock and applying ice, cream and bandages, Grainne claimed that she then sat in the toilet for the following 90 minutes of the flight.

Speaking during the civil case, Ryanair flight attendant Irene Haygir said that cabin crew are specially trained to secure the lids on hot drinks properly before handing them to passengers and that in her ten years of service she had never got it wrong.

She said that scalding incidents happen regularly on flights – around once a month.

Irene was not the crew member who served the tea but she did attend to the passenger after the accident happened.

She said that Grainne appeared to have added milk to her tea before the spill as the liquid appeared milky and there was an opened milk sachet on her tray table, a claim that Grainne denied.

Andrew Walker, the counsel representing Ryanair, argued that Grainne had not only contributed to the accident but had in fact accidentally dropped the cup of tea after adding milk to  it.

But Judge Jacqueline Linnane accepted Grainne’s account and ordered Ryanair to pay £8,880 in damages, as well as court costs.

In 2015, a passenger called Ronald Furlong was awarded £28,000 from Ryanair after he claimed boiling tea was spilled over his groin when cabin crew tried to give the drink to another flier.