PALMERSTOWN HOUSE Estate and golf course at Johnstown, close to the Dublin-Kildare border, is to be offered for sale in the second phase of a sell-off of distressed properties held by the Citywest businessman Jim Mansfield.
Receiver Kieran Wallace of KPMG is handling the sale of the golfing estate for the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), in addition to Mansfield's Weston Executive Airport near Lucan, which has been attracting considerable overseas interest since it went on the market a month ago.
Nama secured a €74 million liability order against Mansfield last October and since then Bank of Scotland has also obtained €214 million summary judgment orders against him arising from his personal guarantees of debts of various firms he controlled.
Robert Ganly of Knight Frank is to seek offers over €12 million for Palmerstown House and its 688-acre estate, which has more than half its land still in agricultural use.
Mansfield bought the late Victorian house and lands from the US heiress Ann Biddle in 1999 and, in the hope of repeating the success of his golf courses at Citywest and competing directly with the more prestigious K Club a few miles away in Co Kildare, he embarked on an ambitious and expensive plan to turn Palmerstown into a premier golf resort complete with a private hotel for wealthy clients. One source close to the project said that the borrowings to purchase and develop the estate were "off the wall".
Mansfield spent a small fortune on building an 18-hole golf course through ancient parklands, mature woodlands and alongside a string of lakes and streams. At the same time he spared no expense on building an over-the-top clubhouse which has a floor area of no less than 2,625sq m (28,255sq ft) on three levels.
The amenities include three large lobbies, a board room, two bar rooms, two function rooms, three separate commercial kitchens and no less than six offices. And to make life easier for what we thought were rich property developers and their bankers and businessmen whose time was even more precious, six of the seven helicopter pads on the estate were allocated a special high-profile park next to the clubhouse.
The whole golfing experiment got under way in 2005 and while it initially prospered after attracting the PGA European Tour and the AIB Irish Seniors golf competition, few, if any, in the Mansfield camp realised that their property empire was in deep trouble.
The collapse of the property industry and the arrival of the IMF bailout team exposed the heavy dependency on bank borrowings by Mansfield and many other large developers, and almost overnight diverted attention from golf and entertaining to survival measures and austerity options. The dramatic fall in property values has, however, made it easier for Knight Frank to find a buyer for Palmerstown, one of the finest country estates in Co Kildare, with a top-class golf course extending to 226 acres, another 393 acres of farmland and the restored main house with six superb reception rooms and 15 bedrooms.
Palmerstown House has been extensively refurbished and remodelled but, with an overall floor area of 2,350sq m (25,295sq ft), it may well be too large for use as a private home.
It was rebuilt in the late Victorian Queen Anne style with the aid of public subscriptions in the late 1870s as a tribute to the memory of the sixth Earl of Mayo (Richard Southwell Bourke), who was chief secretary for Ireland and later viceroy of India, where he was assassinated by an escaped convict in 1872.
The seventh Earl of Mayo subsequently lived there and when the house was damaged during the Civil War it was rebuilt yet again.
