'What's the cut-off point?' - Planners and experts give their view on the illegal Meath mansion

AS WORKERS MOVED to demolish her and her husband’s five-bedroom home in Bohermeen, Co Meath this week, Rose Murray did the rounds on radio stations appealing for leniency.

The stand-off over the massive house at Faughan Hill near Navan grabbed attention, spotlighting the family in their bid to maintain the house they built without planning permission 20 years ago.

It was first refused retention permission by Meath County Council in 2008, and since then it has moved its way through just about every stage of Ireland’s courts system as the Murray family sought to hold on to the property.

A refrain on social media and from the Murrays was that the move to knock the home after a High Court order was a “shame”, coming as it did amid Ireland’s housing crisis.

One group that gives short shrift to this argument is planners.

Some told The Journal that the case is an example of how local councils have a breaking point in their bid to manage the “inherent sustainability of unregulated housing” in rural areas.

Brendan O’Sullivan, a chartered planner and senior lecturer in the department of planning at University College Cork (UCC), said enforcement action where an entire house must be knocked down is considered rare.

“It really doesn’t happen often and it has to be a big breach for it to go that far,” O’Sullivan said.

“People do break the planning rules every now and then. Most of it is unintentional: they might put the wrong thing here or deviate from the approved plans.

“Sometimes it happens because the rules are very complicated – but in the case here, there would have been steps along the way where there was a warning that they were doing something that was not right.”

This was something Rose Murray acknowledged as a mistake on the family’s part in radio interviews she did this week.

However, she expressed anger that attempts to resolve the issue with Meath County Council had failed. These included getting planning permission “on different sites” around the local area.

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O’Sullivan said planning rules are by now “quite unwieldy”, but he believes the Meath dispute is almost unique in that the case lasted this long. “Councils really aren’t fond of taking this type of enforcement in my experience,” he added.

But the fear of “setting a precedent” by allowing the home to be maintained would have motivated them to oppose its construction, O’Sullivan said.

For planner and housing lecturer Lorcan Sirr, this week’s action to begin knocking down the house was a welcome sight.

“It is very positive to see the wilful development of illegal structures like this being taken to task,” said Sirr, who lectures at Technological University Dublin’s school of surveying and construction innovation.

As a nation, we are far too tolerant of letting people do what they want with their properties, including building illegal houses, leaving them empty or even leaving them to fall down, without taking action.

What happened this week?

The long and winding journey around the Murray family’s Faughan Hill home came to a head this week with the decision to proceed with knocking it.

There have been numerous legal challenges between the couple and the council before the High Court, Supreme Court and Court of Appeal over the past two decades.

On Thursday afternoon, the High Court refused a last-minute bid to halt the order granting the council permission to take possession of the house.

Back in 2008, the development was refused retention permission by the council on a number of grounds, including that it would contribute to “excessive density” in a rural area lacking key services and would set an “undesirable precedent” for similar development.

Concerns flagged by planners

More recently, in 2025, the council again refused permission, reiterating concerns about rural overdevelopment and wastewater infrastructure.

These points are key for O’Sullivan from UCC, particularly how there needs to be a moment when someone shouts stop in the face of overdevelopment.

“Modern planning really came out of public health issues: growing cities and towns, people dying of cholera and all these sorts of things,” he explained.

“Its purpose was to regulate how we use land in the interest of the common good.”

Planners want to avoid a “chaotic, scattered” pattern of houses across the countryside, with the “sprawl from Dublin” one aspect they are meant to guard against for counties like Meath, he said. 

“That means at the individual scale, some families will have unhappy outcomes,” O’Sullivan said.

“No individual house will cause sprawl but hundreds will. What’s the cut-off point?”

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Often it comes down to local infrastructure, so where “water supply is at capacity, an engineer or planner might decide they can’t add another connection to it and that’s that”.

This debate has come to the fore once again with Housing Minister James Browne’s recently-announced plans to try and ramp up one-off housing, even amid debate about how wise such a move would be.

This might be different for certain areas, the planner added, such as Connemara or west Donegal where “remoteness” could be considered a core idea to the area.

O’Sullivan said the issue with the Faughan Hill controversy was that it’s one case in a complex system.

“You take a patient with measles. [You can't just] focus on the individual spots rather than the underlying pathology. The spots on the chest are a symptom but we need to worry about the medical condition.

“In our case the condition is the inherent sustainability of unregulated housing that causes sprawl.”

‘The Meath home is tangible’

Others also expressed frustration with the public reaction to the home. 

Sean Keyes, executive director at Progress Ireland, which lobbies for changes to planning legislation among its work, expressed frustration over the outcry in favour of the home and Murrays.

It’s because the home in Meath is “tangible”, Keys said, and people can witness the home get taken apart, brick by brick.

“But what you can’t see is the 500,000 homes that would have existed if not for our clumsy planning system,” Keyes added.

“The things that don’t happen are intangible and invisible and far from everyone’s mind, and nobody will cry about them, but one fine-looking house in Meath will get this reaction. That’s annoying.”

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