Couple facing €500k bill over failed hedge case

A couple embroiled in a legal battle with their neighbours over a hedge are now facing a massive legal bill after they yesterday lost their case.

James and Ann Madigan could be looking at a legal bill as high as €500,000 after 10 years of a bitter dispute and two court battles ended in defeat in the High Court.

The president of the High Court, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns said if the events of this case had featured in the plot of The Field audiences might have regarded them as too implausible to be credible.

“In John B Keane’s play there was a field at stake between the protagonists. In this case it is not more than a few feet of hedge,” he said.

Mr Justice Kearns, who at the outset of the High Court action pleaded with both sides to take an “11th-hour opportunity” to settle and avoid huge legal costs, said yesterday it was almost impossible to understand how such a dispute could have taken seven days of court time in the Circuit Court and a similar amount of time in the High Court.

The judge also awarded all costs against the Madigans.

The case was before the High Court by way of an appeal from the Circuit Court which last year found in favour of James and Ann Madigan, Askintinny, near Clogga Beach in Co Wicklow, and awarded them a total of €5,000 damages for trespass and nuisance and said they were entitled to a right of way onto the laneway for the purpose of maintaining their hedgegrow.

Neighbours Kathleen Maureen Rueter and Marian and Sean Rueter, who run a caravan park near the beach, had appealed that decision to the High Court.

The court heard that an open offer had been made at the start of the appeal by the caravan park owners, the Rueters to settle the case, which included €20,000 contribution towards legal costs previously incurred.

At the centre of the case was the alleged widening of the entrance to the laneway where it meets the public road and which the Madigans claimed encroached on their property.

Yesterday, Mr Justice Kearns ruled that all of the Madigan claims must fail and he granted a declaration that the Rueters are entitled to exclusive ownership, possession, and/or occupation of the laneway, including the hedge.

That ownership, the judge said, will not extend beyond the ditch on the Madigan side of the hedgerow adjoining the laneway.

The judge said all efforts to encourage or broker a compromise in the bitter dispute had failed at every turn.

As a result, he said, the court had to hear not just the evidence of the neighbours but also from multiple experts, including a chartered engineer, a surveyor, an arborist, a Land Commission solicitor, and a historian.

The row over alleged damage to a portion of hedgerow had “raged for 10 years.”

Mr Justice Kearns said a detailed and exhaustive analysis of the title to both plots of land establishes beyond any doubt the laneway is fully owned by the Rueters. The judge said he was further satisfied the Madigans had failed to produce any evidence to support any claim of any sort over the laneway.

The border hedge, the judge, said, was planted over 100 years ago before the Madigan house was constructed and long before any need for privacy arose.

The judge said he felt the hedge on the western side of the laneway belongs entirely to the Rueters, subject to the rights of the Madigans to cut and trim their side of the hedge.

Mr Justice Kearns said there undoubtedly had been a degree of widening of the laneway confined to the eastern side of the mouth of the laneway, but not on the Madigans’ side.

The judge said he was satisfied that any widening or heightening of the laneway was entirely a matter for the Rueters.