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The owner of a house allegedly the subject of complaints by residents due to its state of preservation and neglected garden has filed a challenge with the High Court of the movements of the city council to acquire the property.
Peter Paul Keenan owns a home in Grange, John’s Hill, Waterford, in which the City and County of Waterford placed a Mandatory Purchase Order (CPO) more than a year ago.
Keenan, who says he has lived at Abbey Field, Clonard, Co Meath, for the past 16 years, says he knew nothing about the CPO until September 2020.
He discovered that the council had been sending CPO notices to one of his old Waterford addresses and one in Dublin.
The notices were returned to the council as undelivered, it says in an affidavit.
Keenan says he last rented the property in 2015, but the tenants terminated the lease following complaints from a neighbor that Keenan did not accept.
Stay granted
Mr. Keenan now plans to carry out construction work on the property so his daughters can live there when they attend the Waterford Institute of Technology.
He says he was astonished to discover on September 27 that the locks had been changed.
The council told him that the CPO had been started due to complaints from the neighborhood association. He claims that there is no resident association and believes that the complaints come from a particular resident.
He says he is distraught at the idea that the city council could acquire his property without notifying him.
Mr. Keenan never intended to sell it, and the CPO is grossly disproportionate and fundamentally unfair, he says.
On Monday, Stephen Dodd BL, in place of Mr. Keenan, received permission from Mr. Judge Charles Meenan to initiate a judicial review proceeding seeking to overturn the CPO’s decision. The license request was made with one-sided representation.
The judge also granted a stay of the CPO proceeding pending further determination, but gave the council the freedom to vary or remove the stay with a seven-day notice to Keenan’s side.
He returned the case to January.
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