{"id":634697,"date":"2026-08-13T08:52:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T08:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/634697\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T08:52:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T08:52:19","slug":"us-jury-awards-29m-in-damages-to-family-of-irish-un-employee-who-died-in-2019-boeing-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/634697\/","title":{"rendered":"US jury awards $29m in damages to family of Irish UN employee who died in 2019 Boeing crash"},"content":{"rendered":"

A CHICAGO JURY awarded $29 million (\u20ac25.12 million) in damages to the family of an Irish United Nations employee who died in a 2019 Boeing 737 MAX crash<\/a>, a US court spokesman said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The civil suit was brought against Boeing by Naoise Connolly Ryan, widow of Michael \u201cMick\u201d Ryan, an engineer with the UN World Food Programme who was one of the victims in the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people on board.<\/p>\n

Ryan was deputy chief engineer at the UN\u2019s World Food Programme.<\/p>\n

Originally from Clare, he lived in Cork but had relocated to the programme\u2019s Rome headquarters.<\/p>\n

Ryan had worked during the Ebola crisis in Liberia and with Rohingya refugees. A UN memorial page to Ryan, who was 39 at the time of the crash, also recognised his work Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Ethiopia.<\/p>\n

The case is one of the final remaining civil suits pending against Boeing following the pair of deadly MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 that together claimed 346 lives.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of claims have been settled out of court with undisclosed terms, but Naoise Ryan\u2019s attorney Steven Marks had described his client as \u201ccommitted to seeking accountability and justice from a jury and not accepting money from Boeing directly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boeing has apologised for the crashes and acknowledged that anti-stall software was implicated in both accidents.<\/p>\n

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

In May, a Chicago jury awarded $49.5 million (\u20ac42.88 million) in damages to the family of Samya Stumo, a 24-year-old American who was killed on the same Ethiopian Airlines flight.\n<\/p>\n

\u2018An amazing person\u2019<\/p>\n

Following Ryan\u2019s death in 2019<\/a>, then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar noted that he had been \u201cdoing life-changing work in Africa with the World Food Programme\u201d, while then-President Michael D Higgins expressed his deepest sympathies.<\/p>\n

His mother, Christine Ryan, said her son was \u201can amazing person\u201d who had a \u201cmarvellous vision\u201d for the world.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, his friend Johnny Hegarty said that Ryan \u201csaved countless lives, hundreds, maybe thousands and thousands of lives in his work\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cMick was doing good around the world which was great. That\u2019s what drove him really, I think in his life \u2013 to do good.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

– \u00a9 AFP 2026<\/a>\u00a0and with additional reporting from Diarmuid Pepper<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A CHICAGO JURY awarded $29 million (\u20ac25.12 million) in damages to the family of an Irish United Nations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,10167,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,6584,5,13410,7,8,23039,268265,107,268266,65,257824,66,67],"class_list":["post-634697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-chicago","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-michael-ryan","tag-news","tag-rome","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-un","tag-un-world-food-programme","tag-us","tag-wfp","tag-world","tag-world-food-programme","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117087354638730365","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}