SOME 40 acres of former agricultural lands, immediately south of an old municipal dump, and just west of one of the poorest parts of one of Dublin's most disadvantaged suburbs has become a very expensive piece of real estate. OLIVIA KELLYreports
Securing the land at Dunsink Lane in Finglas has so far cost Fingal County Council €5,470,000. That figure is set to rise as the council still has to pay at least two parties to leave the land, and that's before it pays the original owners to officially buy the land through a compulsory purchase order (CPO).
The council said it needs to acquire the land because it is at the centre of an 800-acre landbank, which includes the decommissioned Dunsink landfill and the Dunsink Observatory, which it intends to redevelop.
Most of this land was already in council or State ownership, but the 40-acre site, formerly farm land, was privately owned.
The council agreed the price for the land with legal representatives of the owners but could not acquire the land because Travellers, some of whom had been living on Dunsink Lane for up to 40 years, were claiming "squatters rights" or possessory title, which is known also by a third term - adverse possession.
Under Irish law 12 years is the threshold after which squatters rights can be asserted, if there has been continuous occupancy of the land.
In general, documentary evidence is required by the courts to prove occupancy, such as utility bills. In the case of the Travellers occupying Dunsink Lane, it was unlikely that they would be able to provide such evidence.
However the council chose not to test the Travellers' claim in the courts and has not conceded that any of these groups had a rightful claim to the land.
"There were no cases of adverse possession here and we have not conceded any such claims. We decided to deal with this as a land acquisition issue, that is the legal advice we received," a spokesman for the council said.
In the end negotiations with the bulk of the groups involved took less than a year, court cases, could, the council believes, have taken considerably longer.
Local authorities and landowners are naturally well versed in the pitfalls of allowing people to remain illegally on their land for such a length of time that they acquire legal rights, and Fingal was not ignorant of this hazard.
However Dunsink Lane, Fingal County Council maintains, is a unique situation, not likely to have implications elsewhere in the county.
To be fair to the council, this has been a situation not entirely of its own making. Travellers were already on the land for a considerable length of time, more than 12 years in some cases, when the council sought to buy it.
The land had ceased to be used for agricultural purposes decades previously, and, being so near a dump, its owners, some of whom, it is understood, were no longer resident in Ireland, had not raised any strenuous objection to their presence.
"This is a situation that evolved over the years. In the case of the CPO lands there may well be people who were in occupation on the lands longer than the threshold, but the council could not tell them to leave when it didn't own the land."
Dunsink Lane had become something of a no-man's land, not least because before 1994, when the four local authorities were created out of the former Dublin Corporation and Dublin County Council, part of this land was in the city's ownership and the rest in the county.
It was just three years after all the land was in the Fingal area that the council received approval for the minister for the environment to CPO the land.
There also remains the possibility that the land could return to city ownership.
In 2005 the city councillors sought a change in the boundary to bring parts of north Dublin, including Dunsink back into the city's boundary.
A study of the lands is being conducted and a proposal to redraw the boundary will then be made by the council to the Minister for the Environment.