At one stage on Friday morning a cloud of dust rising above the large Co Meath home the Murray family built 20 years ago was the only obvious sign that demolition work was under way.
By the time the workers finished their shift and security personnel secured the site for the night, a large part of the interior of the house, built at Faughan Hill, Bohermeen without planning permission, could be seen from the nearby road.
A high-profile legal battle was coming to a rather low-key conclusion. A handful of reporters stood outside, occasionally clambering to get a better view of how the demolition work was progressing. A couple of gardaí kept watch and passing neighbours stopped on occasion. One remarked on how it was a shame that the whole sorry saga was ever allowed to come to this.
There were no protests, though, just a sense that something which seemed increasingly inevitable over the past few years was finally coming to pass.
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As they spoke, a large digger, used earlier to pull back trees in order to allow larger trucks access to the drive, tore chunks of the building down.
It is understood the entire job, which is intended to essentially return the site to the way it was before the Murrays built their 588sq m (6,220sq ft) home in late 2006, will take a couple of weeks to complete.
With the work well under way on Friday, Rose Murray said she and her husband, Chris, would appear in court on Monday to answer a charge of contempt against them.
Speaking to The Irish Times, she said she accepted the battle to save their home was over, that it was going to be demolished and that the family would be left with “nothing”.
Murray insisted their decision to build the house without planning permission was only prompted by frustration over planning applications seeking to build at various locations in the area, where her husband grew up, being turned down time and time again.
It seems, she said, “like there was a personal vendetta against us”.
In relation to the current site, she said planning was refused on different grounds including the lack of services. Murray said the family had installed a “state of the art” percolation system in what she described as “the middle of a nine-acre field”.
She also claimed the couple were told the land had previously been “sterilised”, a legal commitment given that it could not be built on, but that this process was never completed.
In 2010, however, Judge John Edwards, in the High Court, told the couple the construction of the house had not been “a technicality” but rather “a flagrant breach” of the planning laws.
[ How a dream family home in Co Meath became a 20-year nightmareOpens in new window ]
Asked about the persistent legal efforts to thwart the council’s repeated attempts to enforce court orders for the removal of the house, dismissed on one occasion as “frivolous, vexatious and an abuse of process”, Murray claimed they sought to negotiate with the council on reducing the size of the property but were repeatedly rebuffed.
Now, she said, “it leaves us homeless, on the street”.
The couple have two adult sons and one daughter. “The other night, my family were sleeping in five different houses. They asked my son on Monday, did he have somewhere to stay?
“And he told them: ‘This is my house. This is where I stay.’ They offered him a phone number of a bed and breakfast ... to stay with the refugees that’s coming into this country.”
Murray described the treatment of the family with regard to securing their possessions from the house as “barbaric”, but acknowledged she and her husband made a mistake building the house in the first place.
“If I had it all to do again, I’d just move into a caravan.”
