Law of the land finally sanctions buy-out

THIS is a story about a town divided, and how history isn’t dead, but merely sleeping.

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a ground rent law that allows long-standing tenants to buy out the lease.

Ground rent is still paid in parts of the country. It’s a payment for the ground on which a property is built, and the freehold titles tend to be owned by local authorities, or else date from before Independence. For instance, in Castlebar, Co Mayo, the freehold to several properties was owned by Lord Lucan, before he disappeared.

The case in court involved Gus O’Gorman, a supermarket operator in Carrigmacross, Co Monaghan. The town, to a large extent, consists of one main artery and nearly half of the street is still effectively owned by an absentee family who were given the land by Elizabeth I in the 16th century.

O’Gorman wants to buy the lease of his premises on the town’s main street, from the Shirley family. The latter claimed the protection of the Constitution, which, ironically, bestowed huge emphasis on property rights, a legacy of the sense of dispossession many Irish people had felt since colonial days.

The history of the Shirley family’s interest in Carrigmacross is a story in itself.

Elizabeth I awarded the Barony of Farney, encompassing south Monaghan, to one of her favourite earls, Lord Essex. He failed to produce an heir, so the barony was split between his two sisters, who married into the Shirley and Bath families. The split ran down what is now the Main St of Carrigmacross, with the Shirleys owning all to the west, the Baths taking the east.

The town was built in the 1800s and both families continued to prosper in what was granted at her majesty’s pleasure. The Shirleys say that they constructed the west side, but, one way or the other, they own, with a few exceptions, the leases to these properties.

Their “summer home” in the locale is a mansion, Lough Fea House, set in a 1,000-acre estate outside the town.

In the early years of the last century, the Bath family sniffed the winds of change, sold up and returned to the UK.

The Shirleys hung tough. As a result, one side of Carrigmacross is owned by the usual variety of businesses, while the title to the premises on the other side is owned by the Shirleys.

The payment of rents to the Shirley estate continued when independence was won, and generally it was a nominal sum for the times.

Some did better than others. Bank of Ireland, which occupies the finest building on the street, secured a 199-year lease, and AIB, in an equally impressive building, is understood to have a similar agreement.

Ulster Bank, sensible operators that they are, located on the other side of the street.

A few of the premises on the west side were sold off by the Shirleys. One of these is what is now The Fiddlers’ Elbow, a thriving bar and nightclub business, which, according to legend, was sold in controversial circumstances a century ago.

Apparently, the Shirley estate’s native agent was fond of a jar and a flutter, and accumulated debts were paid off by granting the freehold to the then owner of the hostelry. Local wags ascribe the relatively few licenced premises on the west side of the street (there are just two), compared to the east (there were 12 up to recent years), to the incident. Having bailed out one wayward, inebriated native, the absentee landlords were not going to allow another recourse to their fortune to pay bills accumulated through drink.

Most of the other small business people were not as fortunate as The Fiddler’s Elbow. From 1959, a number of leases began coming up for renewal, and ignorance or bad advice ensured that most traders opted for shorter-term tenures. Some of those also had a five-year rent review built in to the contract. One local estate agent says that before the property bubble, the Shirleys were pulling in at least €6,000 (5,000 punts) a week from rents. One of the results of the anomaly is that the tenants on the west side of the street were reluctant to invest in their businesses, when their future was so uncertain. Over the last decade, a number of the leases came up for renewal.

One of them was O’Gorman’s, and he ran a Supervalu on the street. His premises has been vacant for the last eight years as he pursued the legal action.

He moved to buy out the lease under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1980. The Circuit Court confirmed his right to do so, but the Shirleys, through their Isle of Man-based company JES Holdings, appealed to the High Court.

That court also confirmed the buyout, setting the price at €30,000. The court also ruled that the 1980s act was constitutional. Again, JES Holdings appealed, and, last Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the law was constitutional, dealing a blow to the absentee landlord.

O’Gorman can now buy out the lease. But crucially, the court’s ruling does not apply to all the other tenants. They now may have to go to court individually to exercise their right-to-buy. And the indications are that they will be resisted at every turn.

The Shirleys, and their agents, have acted within the law in all of their dealings with the locals, but one might well ask whether the law has been an ass. Was it for this that de Valera framed the Constitution in 1937?

The scion of the Shirley family, Philip, occasionally repairs from his day job in the City of London to the family’s pile at Lough Fay House.

Some years ago, he was seen riding a horse through the main street. As his mount trotted from the north end of the main street, the heir would have observed the contrasting fortunes of the businesses on either side of the thoroughfare.

To the left of him stood a row of premises typical in an Irish town: Pubs, shops, the odd bank, all owned by, or rented from, local people.

To the right, though outwardly similar, he was, and still is, master of practically all he surveyed, the owner of the leases to more than two dozen premises on the west side.

Ireland’s colonial past still casts a long shadow over the south Monaghan market town, not in terms of symbols or psychobabble, but in the more base currency of money. There, the absentee landlord is not something that dissolved with the establishment of the State.

Slowly, the evolution of a law in this Republic appears to be addressing old grievances that have their roots in a land that was divided between aristocracy and serfs.

Nearly a century into the State’s existence, it’s time the law was developed to a point where Carrigmacross can catch up with most of the rest of the country.