Monday morning in the kitchens of Dromoland Castle should have been just another beginning. Emilian Jaskowiak, a forty-year-old kitchen porter from Newmarket-on-Fergus in County Clare, had been hired to scrub, wash and help keep the kitchens of one of Ireland’s most storied five-star hotels running smoothly. Instead, his first day ended in a story that would unravel over the next three years. Jaskowiak would later claim that, while trying to clean the overhead extraction hood in the Fig Tree restaurant kitchen at the resort’s golf clubhouse, he climbed onto a chair and then onto an oven. As he was stepping down, he said, he lost his footing and crashed to the floor, injuring his left shin and right rib cage. The injury, he insisted, had been so serious that it left him shaking, unable to work, and avoiding heavy chores such as hoovering. Yet in a small kitchen crowded with staff, no one saw or heard the fall. That simple, troubling absence of witnesses would eventually transform a routine personal-injury claim into a criminal case, a guilty verdict, and a stark reminder that insurance fraud in Ireland is no longer a quiet, tolerated problem.
The accident was supposed to have happened on January 20th, 2022, and Jaskowiak wasted no time in pursuing compensation. As a kitchen porter, he was not earning a large salary, but the civil courts allow personal-injury awards up to sixty thousand euros in the circuit court, and his claim against Dromoland Castle Holdings Ltd sought damages for the pain and suffering he said he had endured. On paper, the case looked like many others: a workplace accident, a medical report, a claim against the employer’s insurer. But Aviva Insurance Ireland DAC, which insured the hotel, began to look deeper. They found that none of the other kitchen workers had witnessed the incident, even though the room was small and busy. No one heard a chair scrape, a body hit the floor, or a cry of pain. Investigators were uneasy. In the world of insurance, a claim that depends on a single person’s word—especially when everyone around that person heard and saw nothing—is a red flag. Aviva took the unusual step of reporting the matter to An Garda Síochána, and the police began their own inquiry. That complaint would prove to be the turning point, because a civil claim for money was about to become a much more serious matter.
Medical evidence formed the backbone of the case, and it painted a curious picture. On January 25th, 2022, five days after the alleged fall, Jaskowiak visited his doctor. The doctor noted pain in his left shin and right rib cage, but also recorded something far more unusual: a marked tremor in both hands. Jaskowiak told the doctor that the shaking had not existed before the fall, and so the doctor, worried about a possible head injury, sent him to the emergency department for assessment. In a later medical report dated March 14th, 2022, the doctor wrote that the shin injury had healed after a few weeks and the rib injury had settled after four weeks. The tremor, however, was still present but improving. When asked about his daily life, Jaskowiak told the doctor that he had not worked since the accident. Instead, he spent his days at home watching television, walking his dog, doing light chores, and cooking dinner for his wife, who was working. He said he avoided heavy work like hoovering, and felt he was about forty percent better. The doctor’s prognosis suggested the tremor might be a stress reaction and that counselling could be helpful. There was nothing in the medical notes that proved the fall had never happened, but there was also no independent confirmation that it had. Eventually, Jaskowiak made what was described as a full recovery. Yet the gap between the severity of his claim and the ordinary reality of his recovery was the kind of discrepancy that fraud investigators are trained to notice.
The legal proceedings began at Ennis Circuit Court, where Jaskowiak faced not just a civil suit but a criminal charge. He pleaded not guilty to giving false or misleading evidence in a personal-injuries action, an offence under the Civil Liability and Courts Act 2004. The trial lasted three days, and the jury heard how Aviva’s senior investigator, Cuan MacConnell, had grown suspicious because none of the kitchen staff had seen or heard anything. He also told the court that Jaskowiak’s solicitors had stepped down from the civil case in July 2025, after their client was charged and arrested, deciding that the criminal solicitors should handle everything. The civil claim, MacConnell said, had become stagnant, frozen in legal limbo while the criminal case took centre stage. The jury did not take long to reach a verdict. After just twenty-four minutes of deliberation, they found Jaskowiak guilty of giving false or misleading evidence. It was a devastating outcome for the forty-year-old porter, who had travelled from his home to court hoping to clear his name. Instead, he left the courtroom knowing he would return, as Judge Francis Comerford remanded him on bail to a date later that month to fix a sentencing hearing. For a man who had once simply needed a job in a castle kitchen, the consequences had become far more serious than a few bruises.
Aviva responded to the verdict with a statement that carried both relief and warning. Rob Smyth, Aviva’s Head of Investigations and Fraud, praised the work of An Garda Síochána and welcomed the outcome, adding that the company was committed to tackling insurance fraud and protecting customers. His words were carefully chosen, because insurance fraud is not a victimless crime. Every false claim, every exaggerated injury, every story that collapses under scrutiny raises the cost of insurance for everyone else. Honest customers pay higher premiums to cover dishonest claims. Employers face higher legal costs and more defensive procedures. Courts spend precious time on cases that should never have been brought. Aviva’s decision to investigate rather than simply settle reflects a broader shift in the Irish insurance industry, which has been increasingly aggressive in challenging fraudulent and exaggerated claims. The message from Smyth was clear: insurance fraud has wider implications for customers and the industry, and insurers will continue to investigate and challenge claims that do not stand up to scrutiny. For Jaskowiak, that message arrived too late. For other people who might be tempted to invent an accident, it was a warning that even a small lie told in the witness box can be uncovered, and that the price of getting caught is far higher than any settlement.
Behind the legal arguments and insurance statements, there is a human story that is difficult to ignore. Jaskowiak was a kitchen porter, one of the hardest and most underappreciated jobs in any hotel. He was probably tired, underpaid, and eager to make a good impression on his first day at a glamorous estate. It is possible that he fell and hurt himself, and then, when no one seemed to notice, he decided to make the most of a bad situation. It is also possible that he invented the whole incident, trusting that a first-day employee in a busy kitchen would not be contradicted. Either way, the case shows how easily a moment of weakness can spiral into a pattern of lies. The tremor in his hands, the walk with the dog, the dinner for his wife, the careful note that he avoided hoovering—these are details designed to make a claim feel real, but they are also the details that can unravel it. Medical records are not just paperwork; they can either support a story or expose its gaps. Witnesses can forget a small thing, but they rarely all forget a loud crash. In the end, the truth had a quiet, stubborn way of surfacing. The jury saw through the presentation, and the castle’s reputation survived, but the cost of the trial will be felt for some time. Courts are not places where people go to be entertained; they are places where serious questions about honesty, responsibility and trust are answered. For Jaskowiak, that answer was guilty. For everyone else, the real lesson is not just about the law or insurance, but about the simple and enduring value of telling the truth, even when it would be easier to tell a different story.