By: Michael O’Farrell – Investigations Editor.
A NEWLY-ELECTED Sinn Féin TD built a €1m home without planning permission – before seeking help from a Fianna Fáil minister to be allowed to keep it.
North Kildare TD Réada Cronin – then known by her married name Réada Quinn – finished the home in 2002 with her solicitor husband Donal.
Despite not having valid planning permission, the couple continued building – and wanted to add on further unauthorised outbuildings such as a block of four stables – even as Kildare County Council initiated enforcement proceedings against them.
Then, in a bid to circumvent the planning laws they had broken, the Quinns asked then Fianna Fáil Finance Minister, Charlie McCreevy, to lobby Kildare County Council on their behalf.
Mr McCreevy – then a Cabinet Minister – did so, writing to the council on official Department of Finance-headed paper.
But in the end – amid complaints from heritage body An Taisce and upset neighbours – the council secured a court order requiring the Quinn family to vacate the premises by July 31, 2004, and not return there until 2007.
The following year, Ms Cronin – who is this week embroiled in controversy over old tweets which were condemned as anti-Semitic by former justice minister Alan Shatter and the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland – sold the home for more than €1m.
Now separated – and using her maiden name since joining Sinn Féin in 2012 – Ms Cronin currently lives in a gentrified estate on the edge of Maynooth, with her estranged husband occupying a nearby home in the same estate.
Réada and Donal were married in 2000 and moved to a rented home in Kilcock in 2001 as they planned their rural dream home.
Donal is a solicitor of good standing who once worked with the Legal Aid Board and practised in Dublin before opening a practice in Maynooth that is now trading via the www.accidentlawyers.ie website.
They had previously owned homes together in Terenure and Glasnevin where Ms Cronin is understood to have gone to school.
Then in March 2002, they bought a two-acre site – with planning permission for a substantial six-bed home – in a rural townland close to Kilcock.
Planning for the home had been obtained just three months previously by Joseph Coyne – the son of a well-known butcher in Kilcock – on the basis of local needs.
A condition of the planning was that only Mr Coyne or members of his immediate family reside there for at least five years.
Also, planning rules meant that anyone occupying the new home had to be members of farming families primarily involved in agriculture, who were building on their own land and whose primary employment was local.
The Quinn family met none of these conditions.
Nevertheless, in breach of these planning rules and conditions the Quinns set about building their house and moving in.
After taking up residence they then applied to the council for retention of the home – and permission to add new features such as a stable block for four horses.
This retention application was supported by a letter from Mr McCreevy who was then a Fianna Fáil TD for the area and finance minister.
‘Mr Quinn commenced building a house when he purchased the site and was then issued with an Enforcement Notice with regard to this building,’ Mr McCreevy’s letter to the council’s director of planning reads.
‘He has now applied for planning permission to retain the building. He is anxious to obtain planning permission as soon as possible,’ McCreevy’s letter continues.
‘I would be grateful if you could arrange to have this application considered and if you could let me know the outcome in due course,’ the then minister’s letter concluded.
Amid complaints from locals and An Taisce, the application was refused on the grounds that the Quinns had no permission to build or live on the site.
The council also issued an enforcement notice against the Quinns – who continued to build regardless.
In a letter to the council, An Taisce’s Ian Lumley wrote: ‘The house under construction on the site has no planning permission basis since a previous permission granted on the site carried an occupier restriction.
‘We are concerned that notwithstanding the issue of an Enforcement Notice by Kildare County Council, construction of this house is proceeding without planning permission.’
By 2004 – at which point Ms Quinn/ Cronin was a member of the parents’ council of her children’s local school – the council case came to court and the Quinns agreed to a court order to vacate the house by July 2004.
The family told the council that they could not afford to pay rent as well as the mortgage on the unauthorised home but received little sympathy.
‘That is not a planning issue,’ the council responded. ‘The applicant should have been fully aware of the implications of his actions in purchasing a property/site with a residency clause attached.’
In a final effort to regularise their affairs before moving out, the Quinns made one last retention application in June 2004. This was required because unauthorised alterations such as bay windows to the rear, a brick archway at the front door and four brick chimneys had been constructed.
None of these alterations had been granted permission under the original planning granted to Joseph Coyle and the house could not be sold until they were approved.
Once approved the home was advertised for auction in July 2005 with a guide price of €950,000. The home sold before auction when an offer exceeding that amount was accepted.
The intervention of Mr McCreevy in December 2002 made national headlines as An Taisce accused him of seeking to interfere in the planning process.
But due to her change of name, Ms Cronin – who became a Kildare county councillor in 2014 – has not previously been associated with the matter.
The Irish Mail on Sunday asked Ms Cronin to comment, as a public representative, on whether she felt it was right to occupy an unauthorised home constructed in breach of planning laws. We also asked if she felt she should apologise.
In response she said: ‘In relation to my former home, there was an issue in respect of planning and this matter was settled in Court with the consent of Kildare County Council. This dates back almost two decades and is a matter of public record.
‘As a public representative, I will always answer for matters relevant to my role, but matters relating to my family and my personal life are not relevant to my role as a TD. I would have thought that recent discourse surrounding personal issues would have made the media more cognisant of its role in this regard.’ Mr Quinn, meanwhile insisted his former home had not been built illegally.
‘It wasn’t illegal. There was planning in place,’ he said. Mr Quinn added that he and his former wife had ‘complied by consent to the order’ to vacate the property.
Contacted in 2002 by The Irish Times, Mr Quinn said people were ‘entitled to go to their local representative’ with problems. He also said Mr McCreevy was ‘supposed to make representations’ to the council before it decided to institute legal proceedings.
‘I’m not going to go into it because it could be sub-judice,’ Mr Quinn said. The matter had been referred to solicitors in Naas by the county council and by him to his own solicitors. ‘That’s all I can say to you, I’m not going to say any more.’
Pressed on the issue, he insisted that there was ‘valid planning permission’ for a house on his site, though he said unauthorised developments were ‘not unusual in this neck of the woods’.
A spokesman for the Finance Department at the time explained that the minister had a constituency office within the department ‘and they reply to representations all the time on that headed paper’.
She said the case arose from ‘a constituent who came into a clinic with an issue’. It was ‘not unusual for the minister to write to the relevant body and the letter didn’t ask them to do anything other than consider the application’
