O’Donnell children reduced to ‘couch-surfing’ with friends

The adult children of solicitor Brian O’Donnell have been reduced to couch-surfing since being forced out of their Gorse Hill home, which their father has refused to vacate.

Bruce, Blaise, and Alexandra O’Donnell were living in the Killiney mansion up to Sunday of last week, when they had to leave on foot of a High Court order. Their father and mother flew in that weekend from their new home in England and decided to stay on in the property, resulting in three days of barricades and court proceedings.

While all this was going on, the siblings were “camping out” with various friends, and say they have yet to find alternative accommodation.

Blaise O’Donnell told a Sunday newspaper their lives had been turned into a circus by the publicity over her father’s stance.

She said she and her siblings had been kept out of her parents’ business and had no idea how rich they had been until the property empire they had built began to come tumbling down.

She also claimed they did not know their parents had made them the owners of Gorse Hill until the banks came looking for the property in part-payment of massive debts Brian and Mary Patricia O’Donnell accrued.

Blaise, 27, who works in recruitment, said her parents, who once owned a property portfolio worth more than €1bn, had never told their children how wealthy they were because they did not want them to have the attitude that they were “entitled”.

“It wasn’t on our radar,” she said, and life was “boring and “normal”, although she attended two fee-paying schools for her secondary education and also completed two costly post-graduate courses after her Bachelor of Commerce degree.

Her eldest brother, Blake, 30, is a solicitor working in the property business in England; her other brother, Bruce, is a self-employed project management consultant, and her younger sister, Alexandra, is still in college.

She objected to some of the descriptions of Gorse Hill, refuting the notion that it was a lavish property and insisting it suffered from wear and tear because there was not enough money in recent years to maintain it.

She said that she and her siblings were fully behind her parents’ battle to hold on the house, and the family were not prepared to “go away and walk quietly into the night”.

Brian and Mary Patricia O’Donnell were served with a trespass notice last Tuesday but challenged it in court and a judgment has yet to be delivered, which means they can stay in the property in the meantime. They are due in the High Court today on separate but related proceedings arising from their bankruptcy. They were declared bankrupt in 2013 on an application by Bank of Ireland but want this overturned.

They had previously tried to be declared bankrupt in England, where they now live, but their application was rejected because their main centre of business was Ireland.