US jury awards $29m in damages to family of Irish UN employee who died in 2019 Boeing crash

A CHICAGO JURY awarded $29 million (€25.12 million) in damages to the family of an Irish United Nations employee who died in a 2019 Boeing 737 MAX crash, a US court spokesman said Wednesday.

The civil suit was brought against Boeing by Naoise Connolly Ryan, widow of Michael “Mick” 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.

Ryan was deputy chief engineer at the UN’s World Food Programme.

Originally from Clare, he lived in Cork but had relocated to the programme’s Rome headquarters.

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.

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.

The vast majority of claims have been settled out of court with undisclosed terms, but Naoise Ryan’s attorney Steven Marks had described his client as “committed to seeking accountability and justice from a jury and not accepting money from Boeing directly.”

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Boeing has apologised for the crashes and acknowledged that anti-stall software was implicated in both accidents.

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In May, a Chicago jury awarded $49.5 million (€42.88 million) in damages to the family of Samya Stumo, a 24-year-old American who was killed on the same Ethiopian Airlines flight.

‘An amazing person’

Following Ryan’s death in 2019, then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar noted that he had been “doing life-changing work in Africa with the World Food Programme”, while then-President Michael D Higgins expressed his deepest sympathies.

His mother, Christine Ryan, said her son was “an amazing person” who had a “marvellous vision” for the world.

Meanwhile, his friend Johnny Hegarty said that Ryan “saved countless lives, hundreds, maybe thousands and thousands of lives in his work”.

“Mick was doing good around the world which was great. That’s what drove him really, I think in his life – to do good.” 

- © AFP 2026 and with additional reporting from Diarmuid Pepper