Couple Ordered to Demolish House - any update?

So I break the law, say, for example, I drive my Ferrari down the motorway at 275 kph. But , because I’ve loads of money, I pay a fine of €250,000 and carry on driving with no ban enforced.
Does everybody win? I certainly do.

Why were the ever allowed to finish it and move in? Electricity, Eircode, opening onto public road etc.

Maybe they did it all over a weekend?

Again, the headache going away would be demolishing the building.

Trying to find a technicality to keep it opens the doors to a whole range of new and numerous legal and regulatory headaches which would far outweigh any benefits of keeping this one property which is out in the sticks and would probably require massive overhaul and adaptation for whatever their intended use for it may be.

I'm perfectly happy to say "never" in this case.

If their desperation hasn't enable them to find such a "technicality" at any point in the past 19 years, your faith that they will find one now is quite touching, really.

But, as Penn points out, if the goal is to make the headache go away, that's best acheived by demolishing the building. Problem solved.

As far as the owners are concerned, even if the building isn't demolished, that's little consolation. This whole saga has been a financial disaster for them. The building is worthless; nobody will buy it any price, and no bank will take a mortgage over it. Their entire investment in putting up the house, and in taking (and losing) multiple legal actions to try to defend what they have done, is a write-off. All they are left with is a site which is currently worth less than it would be if vacant, since anyone acquiring the site will have to pay the cost of clearing and remediation before they can do anything with it.

Why would they burn tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of euros in legal fees if they were content with an unsaleable, unmortgageable house?

. . . for which they have paid well over the odds, and which is now worthless. Even if living in a (fairly hideous) mansion is all you aspire to, there are much cheaper ways of making your pwecious dweam come twue.

They could have lived in a rented mansion for all those years, have had exactly the same utility, suffered much less stress, and now be much better off. Or they could have built a house with planning permission, saved hundreds of thousands in legal fees, and now own an extremely valuable asset which they could bequeath to their children.

Seriously this is the worst financial decision they have ever made or could possibly have made, and they know it. And so do their kids, who have watched their potential inheritance being squandered by this entitled lunacy.

The trouble is that now, they've run out of road. They got to live in the house for about 20 years, that's true. But they likely have no further ways of extending their legal challenges any further. Which means the situation they are likely to start facing if they do not agree to move out within an agreed timeframe, is huge fines, possible prison time if they continue to disregard the order (at which point they will have been removed from the house and demolition would go ahead), and ultimately they will have zero gained from the house. They can't sell it, can't pass it on, can't get any money back from it. Already spent huge money in legal fees challenging the decisions. Not to mention that while they have gotten to live in the house for about 20 years, it's far worse than "It hasn't gone swimmingly for them". They've been living with the constant stress, time and effort of the legal challenges and knowledge that if they can't win, their house will be demolished.

At the end of it all, once the demolition goes ahead, they will have no house they can sell or pass on, land which can only be sold for agricultural purposes (so won't fetch as high a price as land someone could build on), and will still have to buy/rent/build a new home 20 years after already thinking they built the home they'd be in for the rest of their days.

They are living in a mansion built on quicksand. The bill comes due.

Do you think that after almost 20 years of the Council fighting repeated legal challenges and appeals to enforce the demolition order, with every court along the way agreeing with their decision, and with no more avenues in which the Murrays can bring further legal challenges or objections… that the Council will now turn around and say "Actually, it's fine, keep the house"?

People underestimate the impact that setting a precedent like that would have. You may not believe the demolition will go ahead simply on a "this specific case" basis. The legal ramifications it would have for the Council would be huge because it could see them challenged on every sterilisation order, every retention application, every refusal where the primary reasons were similar to this case, and every time they have brought others to court for enforcement issues.

You may not believe the demolition will go ahead. For Meath County Council, the demolition has to go ahead. They have to enforce this because the consequences of not enforcing it are far, far worse. It's why they have been fighting to enforce it every bit as much as the Murrays have been fighting against it.