Paisley family awarded damages over mum's asbestos-related death

A Paisley family have been awarded nearly a quarter of a million pounds damages after their mum died from abestos-related disease from washing their dad's overalls.

Adrienne Sweeney's late husband, William, came into contact with the deadly susbstance when he worked at the Babcock & Wilcox boiler factory in Renfrew in the 1960s.

Lawyers say it's the first time in Scottish legal history where a case has been successfully pursued on behalf of someone who suffered from secondary exposure to asbestos from their spouse’s clothes.

Mrs Sweeney died in 2015 from the terminal condition mesothelioma.

Mr Sweeney had passed away some years before, leaving Mrs Sweeney’s family in the difficult position of proving their case with their dad not there to provide evidence of the working conditions at Babcock’s. Crucial to the case was the evidence of a former colleague, who himself died before the hearing.

Commenting on her family’s behalf, Mrs Sweeney’s daughter Kay Gibson said: “We are pleased that our case against Babcock International was successful. Most importantly this gives our late mother the justice she wanted in life and that we sought on her behalf after her painful and unnecessary premature death.

“Our loving mother, like so many other women in Scotland in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, supported her family by caring for her children and washing her husband’s overalls when he returned from a hard day’s work for employers who used deadly asbestos. These women like our mother were unaware how unsafe it was to be handling the asbestos dust that came from these work clothes or of the contamination risk to their own and their families’ lungs. We her children await to see if we will suffer the same fate.

“Babcock International have not won their case but is it wrong that ordinary bereaved families still have to individually battle the might of global corporations for justice for their late relatives in such situations. “