Provisional liquidators appointed to Dublin city centre nursing home

The High Court has appointed joint provisional liquidators to a Dublin city centre based nursing home.

The application was in relation to St Monica’s Nursing Home Ltd, which ran the elderly care facility at Belvedere Place, Dublin had catered for 46 residents, and had employed 65 full-time and part-time employees.

The company, which is a registered charity, is insolvent, unable to pay its debts as they fall due arising out of a drop of income, and an inability to fund fire safety improvements that it needed to carry out in order to retain a licence to operate a nursing home.

The firm sought the appointment of liquidators to ensure that the business is wound up in an orderly fashion.

Ms Justice Teresa Pilkington at Tuesday’s vacation sitting of the High Court said she was satisfied to appoint insolvency practitioners Ian Barrett and Shane McCarthy of KPMG Ireland as joint provisional liquidators to the company.

Seeking their appointment Stephen Brady BL for the company said the company, whose members are the Religious Sisters of Charity order, had decided some months ago to cease trading.

This was because the nursing home did not have the estimated €1.3 million required to pay for fire safety improvements. Its sole source of funding came from the State’s Nursing Homes Support Scheme.

The firm’s inability to carry out these improvements meant its operating licence would have been withdrawn before the end of the year.

Counsel said the home had suffered a loss of income of €135,000 per year when in order to comply with Hiqa’s health and safety regulations it had to convert two rooms used for patients into additional storage space.

It had planned to move the residents to other suitable facilities and wind down the business by the end of June, and it had informed all relevant parties of its decision.

However, this plan, counsel said, had been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which had a particularly strong impact on the nursing home sector.

St Monica’s had been able to move most of its residents, and only 14 currently remain. It was hoped that all of the remaining residents will be transferred by the end of August.

However, counsel said that the delay has meant that the company is insolvent and unable to pay its debts to it creditors as they fall due.

One of its main creditors, counsel said, are its employees, many of whom have put in years of good service to the company. Counsel said they are collectively owed up to €900,000 in redundancy and other payments.

In light of its situation the board, which consists of voluntary directors, resolved to seek the appointment of liquidators who would be best placed to manage the orderly winding up of the company for the benefit of all parties including the creditors.

Ms Justice Pilkington in making the appointment noted the directors’ desire to bring in professional help and adjourned the matter to a date in the new legal term.