The Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, used his Cabinet post to lobby on behalf of a constituent who was building a house without planning permission in Kildare.
Mr McCreevy is a Fianna Fáil TD for the North Kildare constituency, but he used his ministerial notepaper and signed himself "Minister for Finance" when writing to Kildare County Council officials about the house being built without permission by a solicitor, Mr Donal Quinn.
Planning permission to retain the house in Ballycaghan, near Kilcock, was refused by the council on October 9th last.
The Kildare county secretary, Mr Charlie Talbot, said yesterday that the case has been referred to the council's solicitors. Any delay in dealing with it was solely due to court cases taking time. "It's a feature of the legal system and doesn't mean we're being influenced by representations," he said.
An Taisce claims the delay in seeking an order to have the house demolished is due to political representations, but this was strenuously denied by Mr Talbot. He said any imputation that the council was not taking action in the case because of political pressure was "totally without foundation. Though it gives me no pleasure to say so, An Taisce is wrong and will be seen to be wrong", Mr Talbot said.
Planning permission to retain the house was refused by the council in October on the grounds that it is located in a rural area where residential development is restricted to those engaged in agriculture. It would also "conflict with current county development plan policy on the prevention of random rural development, ... would represent a precedent for further such development and would therefore be contrary to the proper planning and development of the area".
The council's decision said the house was located in a rural area outside any designated settlement and was unrelated to the needs of agriculture. Its owner, Mr Quinn, a solicitor with offices in Crumlin, in Dublin, had "not shown a sufficient functional need to live in the area".
Under the county plan, permission for "one-off" houses in areas of development pressure is restricted to people working in agriculture, horticulture, forestry or bloodstock, members of farm families and others who can demonstrate a need to live in rural locations.
If permitted, the council said, the house at Ballycaghan would be likely to give rise to the generation of additional traffic in the area and to a demand for public services and community facilities "which it is not economic to provide and which are not planned". Its decision also noted that the development contravened five conditions of a previous permission granted on the same site, that it was "visually obtrusive and out of character" with existing houses in the area and that it would "seriously injure" their amenities.
The earlier permission was granted in 2001 to Mr Joseph Coyne on condition that the house then proposed would be inhabited by him or a member of his immediate family.
Another house in the same field was permitted in 1998 subject to a similar condition.
Mr Robert Duff and Ms Laura Halpin, two residents of the area who objected to the latest house, say the earlier one also breached this condition as it was "resided in immediately by persons who are not, in any way, shape or form of the Coyne lineage".
Mr Quinn had lodged a planning application on August 15th seeking permission to retain a "two-storey house, garage and effluent treatment system". The third floor, with four Velux windows to the rear, was described as a "storage area".
On August 16th, Mr McCreevy wrote a letter on behalf of Mr Quinn - using his Department's official notepaper, headed Oifig an Aire - to Mr Tommy Skehan, the council's planning director, saying he would be "grateful if you could arrange to have this application considered".
Mr McCreevy noted that Mr Quinn had purchased the one-acre site from Mr Coyne. Having started building the house, he was issued with an enforcement notice and was now "anxious to obtain a decision on his application [for retention] as soon as possible".
On October 9th, the Minister was informed by Mr Talbot that the council had decided to refuse permission for five stated reasons. His letter was addressed to Mr McCreevy at the Department of Finance on Merrion Street.
Mr Quinn could have appealed against this decision to An Bord Pleanála within a month, but chose not to exercise this right. Instead, work continued on building the house in defiance of the council's enforcement notice and it has since been occupied.
An Taisce's heritage officer, Mr Ian Lumley, wrote to Mr Skehan on November 19th expressing concern that the council had failed to take further enforcement action by way of seeking a High Court injunction against Mr Quinn under Section 150 of the 2000 Planning Act.
After he was informed that the case had been "referred to our solicitors for legal action", Mr Lumley wrote last week to Mr Talbot, pointing out that An Taisce had been seeking legal action to halt construction of the house since August 13th last.
Referring to the "continuing failure of Kildare County Council to take legal action to secure the demolition and removal of this unauthorised development", he asked whether any "external representations" had been made "which would establish a reason for this failure".
Noting that Mr McCreevy had already made representations on Mr Quinn's behalf, Mr Lumley wanted to know whether any further representations had been made by the Minister in relation to pending legal proceedings in the case.
Contacted yesterday 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," he added.
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 Department of Finance described Mr McCreevy's letter as a "regular constituency matter". She explained that the Minister had a constituency office within the Department "and they reply to representations all the time on that headed paper". THough not prepared to discuss the case, she said it had arisen 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".
Mr Talbot said yesterday he was not in position to respond in detail. "The fact is that we refused premission for this development, so we weren't influenced in our attitude by external representations."
According to the Ombudsman, Mr Kevin Murphy, there is "a marked reluctance on the part of local authorities to take developers to court" - as they are mandated to do by the 2000 Planning Act - "for breaching the terms of planning permissions or building illegally".
