A TAXI DRIVER has denied she was driving carelessly when her car hit an elderly woman crossing the road on a winter’s morning five years ago.

Sinead Roche (43) continued to drive her car after knocking the pedestrian down but returned to the scene minutes later, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard.

Roche of Rutland Grove, Crumlin is on trial charged with careless driving causing serious bodily harm to Margaret Rooney at Sundrive Road, Crumlin on 4 December 2016.

She is also charged with failing to offer assistance after her car was involved in causing an injury, failing to stay at the scene and failing to report to gardaí. She has pleaded not guilty to all four counts.

The trial has heard evidence that at around 7.15am Roche was carrying a passenger to work when she heard a bang and “panicked”. The passenger testified that it was “pitch black” at the time but that “it was starting to get bright”.

Roche told gardaí that she slowed the car and looked in her rear view mirror but didn’t see anything. She continued to drive on to the passenger’s destination nearby.

She then drove back to the scene and saw a woman lying on the road with some people looking after her. Roche became upset and presented herself to gardaí at the scene then.

Garda Donal O’Donnell told Siobhán Ní Chúlacháin BL, prosecuting, that Roche told him that she had heard a bang and asked the passenger if she had seen what had happened and the passenger replied that she hadn’t.

Roche told him she believed the bang may have come from hitting an animal. He said he had no suspicion that the defendant was intoxicated in any way.

He said Roche later came to the garda station and gave a voluntary statement in which she said “I panicked, I didn’t know what had happened”.

She said she slowed the car “right down” and looked in her rear view mirror but didn’t see anything. She said she believed she had hit “either a fox or a dog or something”.

She said she returned to the scene “to see what I had hit” and saw two women crouched down on the road beside someone lying on the ground.

“I got out. I was in such a shock. A lady came up to me and said it’s ok, accidents happen, she’s ok. I was so upset, inconsolable, devastated,” she said.

The court heard that Rooney was aged 77 at the time and suffered serious injuries, including injury to her head and ankle. She has since developed dementia and will not be a witness at the trial.

Under cross-examination Garda O’Donnell told Philip Sheahan SC, defending, that there was no evidence of the victim wearing “hi-vis” clothing or having a torch.

Edward Davin, a retired garda who was a forensic collision investigator in 2016, told Sheahan that the street lights at the scene were the old orange coloured sulphur lighting. He agreed that these gives an inferior quality of lighting to the modern “white LED lights”.

He told the court that a stationary person would be harder to see in the sulphur street lights, as “they don’t offer the same definition of vision as the white lights”.

The trial continues on Monday before Judge Elma Sheahan and a jury.

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