ABSTRACT
Product and service liability are concerned with the damage which products or services cause to persons or property. Non-standard products could either be one-off manufacturing defects or design defects resulting from the way the production system was designed. The European defectiveness standard is a variant on the consumer expectation standard, which has been widely rejected in the US. Given the choice of a consumer expectation standard, the inclusion of state of the art and development risks defence, it might be argued that the new strict liability standard differs little from the previous negligence liability regime. The Irish law also implies a term 'that the supplier has the necessary skill to render the service', whereas under English law if a consumer discovers that a supplier lacks the necessary skills to perform the task he or she will probably have to wait to see if the task is actually performed negligently.
