Couple Ordered to Demolish House - any update?

Planning decisions and reasons are in the public domain.

If the family end up homeless after demolishing the house, I'd guess that normal homeless provisions would kick in.

Meath CoCo can't CPO the site or just take and convert the house into flats. There are prescribed punishments for unauthorised development which Meath CoCo have to abide by, and that includes forcing the owners to demolish the property. Not only that but the cost for Meath to buy the house and convert it wouldn't be worth it, nor would the added costs if the owners objected to the CPO (which they surely would). The owners could say if the property is okay for Meath CoCo to purchase and use for housing, then the Council are ignoring their own grounds for not granting retention permission to the owners.

They should be forced to demolish the property. That's the only reasonable outcome at this stage.

I’d say if you come back to this thread in 2028 there will still be no update.

Meath Co Co are just hoping that house sinks into the bog!

The current appeal is in her name.

If the appeal fails…..i guarantee the husband will submit an appeal in his name….Will add another year to this fiasco.

Just out of interest how can Meath County Council pursue this (I believe they should) but Galway County Council are leaving the son of a councillor alone after he built with no planning - seems way too obvious to be purely political but maybe they're that blatant about it

Will you ever just knock it off? Ireland is responsible for 0.11% of global CO2 emissions, The Chinese are expected to add 200 GW of additional coal fired power by the end of the decade, that's on top of the gobsmacking amount of CO2 they spew already:

Everyone in Ireland with a car could be driving 5.0L V8s and it wouldn't make one scintilla of difference compared to what china emits and the significant increase they are planning on. This really, really is not a case of every little bit helps. Ireland could cease outputting any CO2 at all with everyone committing suicide tomorrow and it just wouldn't matter one iota or change anything. You can delude yourself with the idea you riding a bike makes a difference compared to someone driving a car, but that's all it is - delusion.

There's a statute of limitation of seven years on enforcing planning violations under section 157 (4) of the Planning and Development Act, 2000

The first complaint to Galway County Council about the house you refer to was on the 21st of October 2023. The council deemed that the development occurred more than 7 years prior to that, and they were therefore legally prohibited from pursuing the matter.

The saga over the Meath house is very long-running, but I assume that the first planning enforcement action was brought within the first 7 years of it being built. I haven't looked for the exact timeline, but there's an article from 2022 that says the house was built "over 15 years ago", and that the Council first took action "over a decade ago". So it sounds like the action was first taken within 5 years of the house being built.

So if you can keep your house off the Council's radar for 7 years, you can get away with not having planning. However, a guy in England tried that with a mock Tudor mansion he built in 2001. He hid it behind a wall of hay bales for 4 years (the UK statute of limitations on planning matters), only to revel it when he thought he was in the clear. The courts, however, ruled that the four year period only began when the bales were removed - so he was (successfully) ordered to demolish it.

Will you ever just knock it off. It's the other boy's fault Mammy, he's much bolder than me.

Grow TF up.

There was a prohibition on building on the land when they bought it. It should be levelled to shore up the already poor planning enforcement we have in this country. They should never have been allowed/able to complete it.

What I found shocking about this, is that the Murray's are just submitting multiple retention applications for the property, and the Council don't seem to have the power to just dismiss them outright on the basis that the decision has already been made on the previous application for retention.

Could they just do this ad nauseam? They are just trying to play the system (as they have been doing since day one), and pleading for mercy publicly. If ever there was a bunch of schysters…….