Independent TD Michael Healy-Rae flouted planning laws to construct four apartments without planning permission.

The secretly built apartments, in Deputy Healy-Rae’s hometown of Kilgarvan, were completed last year. The colourful Kerry TD then sought, and was granted, retention for the sub­divided house after he was issued with an enforcement warning letter by Kerry County Council. 

Prior to completion of the Kilgarvan development, An Bord Pleanála had moved to block a similar four-apartment scheme Mr Healy-Rae had sought permission to build in Tralee. The Kilgarvan house, known locally as ‘Jack Cahill’s house’, is opposite Mr HealyRae’s post office, shop and petrol station.

The unauthorised Kilgarvan apartments were not specifically declared by Mr Healy-Rae in his Oireachtas declaration of interest last year, which referred simply to a ‘private house’ in Kilgarvan. Kerry County Council planning files confirm Mr Healy-Rae bought the house in 2018 and submitted a planning application the following year to ‘alter and extend’ the property into a five-bedroom home.

The council granted planning permission in January 2020, subject to conditions. These specified the building must be constructed entirely in accordance with the drawings submitted.AdvertisementVolume 0% Instead, the Kerry TD built four separate apartments on the site in 2020, during the pandemic. Each apartment has its own entrance, kitchen, bathroom, living room and parking space – none of which was given planning permission. Mr Healy-Rae funded the unauthorised development with a mortgage from Allied Irish Bank, which was secured against the property a month after planning was received.

Based on property values in the area, it is likely the politician paid in the region of €65,000 for the property before investing in the redevelopment. He now stands to profit after developing the house into apartments, with the housing crisis creating unprecedented demand for accommodation.

One-bedroom apartments in the area, close to popular tourist destinations Kenmare and Killarney, can command between €80 to €100 a night on Airbnb. Similar units are being let on a long-term basis for between €500 to €600 a month. Kerry County Council confirmed it initiated enforcement action and issued the TD with a warning letter in December 2020 on foot of a complaint.

A council statement said: ‘The unauthorised works referred to in the warning letter included altering, extending and subdividing a house.’

Under planning laws, councils have extensive powers to enforce unauthorised developments up to, and including, demolition. They can also prosecute those in breach of planning rules. As Mr Healy-Rae was building his Kilgarvan apartments, the council was prosecuting him for the alleged unauthorised erection of a billboard across the road.

The action was ultimately unsuccessful because the court ruled the seven-year statutory period for planning cases had expired by the time the case was taken. Recently, the council has also initiated enforcement action against Mr Healy-Rae relating to an advertising structure on the gable of a former pub in Tralee. The Kerry TD removed the structure when served with an enforcement notice.

But there would be no enforcement notice relating to the unauthorised apartments in Kilgarvan. Instead, Mr Healy-Rae submitted a retention application at the end of March this year which was approved weeks later, ending the council’s enforcement of the matter. A council spokesman told the MoS: ‘In cases where a grant of permission results, it is the policy of the Planning Authority not to pursue further enforcement actions as such would be almost certainly unsuccessful.’

The spokesman added that enforcement would have been futile because the apartment ‘development did not result in any environmental or other material damage to a protected structure or protected monument’.

Nevertheless, when asked for the council’s view on unauthorised development, the spokesman said: ‘Kerry County Council believes that a strong culture of enforcement is critical to ensure that all goals and objectives of the planning function work to a high standard and for the benefit of the whole community.’

(Additional reporting Ken Foxe)

TDs FLATS COULD NET €100 A NIGHT

MICHAEL HEALY-RAE is no stranger to controversy, nor is he unfamiliar with planning permission rules.

As a long-sitting TD and Kerry county councillor before that, he will have advised many on how to navigate the planning system.

As a postmaster, a shop-owner, a farmer and the Dáil’s largest landlord he has been dealing with planning all his life.

There have been 14 planning applications in the name of Michael Healy-Rae before Kerry County Council since 2003. They include farm buildings, shop storerooms/extensions, houses and apartments.

Planning and construction of the unauthorised Kilgarvan apartments proceeded at the same time as one of Mr Healy-Rae’s projects in Tralee was being rejected by An Bord Pleanála for the second time.

Unlike the unauthorised Kilgarvan development, Mr Healy-Rae had submitted accurate plans for his Tralee development. But anyone concerned about Mr Healy-Rae’s Kilgarvan apartments may have been denied any opportunity to object because the plans only showed a routine five-bed house.

The Kilgarvan application, submitted in August 2019 by Mr Healy-Rae’s agent and architect, Patrick Murphy, looked straightforward and simple.

Mr Healy-Rae wanted to redevelop a dilapidated house across the road from his shop and petrol station in Kilgarvan.

The new application was for permission ‘to alter and extend existing dwelling house’ and details a proposal for a ‘4+ bedroom’ house with two parking places.

Design plans, submitted as part of the application, show a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a dining room, one bedroom downstairs and four bedrooms and a shower room upstairs. In total, the development. size was to be 164.6sqm.

The standard declaration accompanying the application is signed by Patrick Murphy, as Mr Healy-Rae’s agent .

Over the course of the following five months the file shows some routine correspondence between the planning department ‘d

Mr Healy-Rae’s agent relating to issues with windows, site boundaries and a shed.

On January 11, 2020 planning was granted with six routine conditions.

Then, in the midst of the pandemic, something inexplicable happened.

Instead of building the house for which planning had been granted, Mr Healy-Rae hired contractors who demolished all but a portion of the front wall and constructed four selfcontained apartments on the site.

Each of the then-unauthorised apartments was approximately 40sqm, making a total floor space of 178sqm, 13.4sqm larger than the area applied for.

The two car parking spaces had morphed to become four spaces.

the development. appeared to represent a breach of planning laws and a breach of the permission that was granted for the house.

Mr Healy-Rae applied for retention permission after the council issued him with a warning letter on foot of a complaint.

The application for retention, submitted in late March this year, sought to retain the ‘dwelling house as constructed’.

The application also sought retrospective ‘change of use of this dwelling house to four… residential units’.

In granting the retention permission, the council stipulated that the ‘four units shall remain as one integral unit under one ownership and no individual unit shall be disposed of as a separate entity’.

What planning laws say about breaches of rules

PLANNING laws in Ireland are set out in the Planning and development Acts 2000-2012.

Among other things, the legislation defines an unauthorised development as a building ‘not carried out in accordance with the permission granted or any condition to which that permission is subject’.

Under section 151 of the Act: ‘Any person who has carried out or is carrying out unauthorised developments hall be guilty of an offence.’

Penalties for breaches of planning law depend on the nature of the offence but can result in a criminal prosecution, a fine and/or a prison sentence or both.

The penalty for carrying out an unauthorised development, for example, can rise to as much as a €5,000 fine and/or a six-month prison term.

In practice, an enforcement notice. or court order to demolish an unauthorised development is more likely, though not common.

But the planning acts contain significant wriggle room for developers, mostly in the provisions allowing retention permission to be sought for an already-built development.

Officially, retention is frowned upon and not encouraged but it is acknowledged that sometimes mistakes can occur and lead to planning regulations being inadvertently breached.

This grey area of retention gives councils significant powers to rectify what would otherwise be an unauthorised development.

Planning law also provides that, even if a development is unauthorised, a council may consider that it is trivial or minor, and may decide not to take action .

They cannot do this in cases involving an environmental impact assessment.

A council must investigate if a formal complaint is made, but can regularise an otherwise unauthorised development by granting retention so long as a project is in keeping with local needs and plans.

For a developer, retention is a risky strategy since failure to secure this permission could result in an order for the property to be demolished.