Mellon selling in Kilkenny at a loss

Niall Mellon, whose charity built thousands of houses for the poor of Cape Town, is selling his 242-acre Kilkenny estate – now worth nearly half what he paid for it in 2005

NEXT MONTH, hundreds of Irish volunteer construction workers are expected to travel to South Africa for the latest “building blitz” organised by the Niall Mellon Township Trust.

However, despite constructing over 15,000 new houses for needy South Africans since 2002, the philanthropic developer hasn’t been so lucky with his property and business affairs here.

Mellon (43), who has extensive property interests in Ireland and Britain, is perhaps best known for his €50 million purchase of the former Bank of Ireland playing fields at Knockrabo House – a 7.5-acre site off Mount Anville Road, Goatstown, Dublin 14, which became enmeshed in a protracted planning dispute.

In July this year, Marlay Grange, his neo-Gothic Victorian mansion in Rathfarnham was destroyed by fire. It was uninsured. Earlier, in March, he was listed in Stubbs Gazette, after a judgement against him in the London High Court for a debt of over €300,000.

In a statement he said: “Over the past two years I have used all my personal funds to pay off almost all my business creditors (except long-term bank loans) . . . That is the most any decent person can do in the current difficult climate.”

Mellon further explained that: “As a property-based businessman, it is very difficult if not impossible to borrow against one’s property assets, and I am doing everything I can as a responsible person to honour my debts and pay them off”.

Now he has decided to sell Coolmore, his country house estate on 242 acres near Thomastown, Co Kilkenny.

It’s for sale at €3.75 million, through Colliers International.

He is understood to have paid over €6 million for the property in in 2005.

This is simply one of the finest properties in the lovely River Nore valley, about 11 miles (18km) south of Kilkenny city with easy access to the new M9 Dublin-Waterford motorway.

The large Georgian house of 729sq m (7,847sq ft) has wonderful, uninterrupted views over the Nore and wooded countryside to Brandon Hill.

A granite-porticoed entrance leads to a reception hall adorned with the compulsory antlered stags’ heads – although one brave hart suffers the indignity of sporting a Rudolph plastic red nose. Not quite taxidermy à la Downton Abbey.

Incidentally, the estate manager helpfully explained that the property comes with its own herd of red deer and two stags if the new owners “fancy a bit of shooting”. The ground floor has four spacious reception rooms, a large country-style kitchen and a self-contained nanny-flat.

Upstairs there are six bedrooms. The house appears to be in excellent structural condition but needs a makeover as neither the interiors nor the furnishings live up to the standards expected of, and once maintained by “the gentry”.

The house is exceptionally private and is reached by tree-lined avenues leading from a choice of two gated entrances.

Most of the land is devoted to a working farm (currently managed) and includes exclusive fishing rights along one bank of the salmon-rich Nore.

According to the agent, Mellon has spent “an awful lot of money” on the grounds – including laying some 4km of cobble-lock pathways.

He has also installed an extra-ordinary sculpture garden, dominated by a circle of looming, Ogham-style stones and resembling a cross between Stonehenge and Newgrange.

A yew-walk leads to a restored walled garden. A neat little two-bedroom gate lodge provides accommodation for staff. The grounds even boast an unintended folly and a sign of the times: a complex of former stone-built stables in the process of being converted into guest accommodation.

As with countless ghost estates throughout the country, the construction is incomplete.

Local people recall that the rustic peace of the area was formerly – and frequently – disturbed by the whirring sound of “a helicopter coming and going”.

Not any more. To paraphrase Shelley: “Look on my helipad, ye mighty, and despair!”