Senior counsel Ross Maguire founded New Beginning in 2010 to help people in mortgage arrears, pivoting into the provision of social housing in more recent years. Maguire has now given the property market his own vote of confidence, spending an eye-watering sum on a rural estate in Co Kildare. The barrister is the new owner of Ballindoolin House in Carbury, an eight-bedroom Georgian mansion on 238 acres that had been on the market for €3.5 million.
While the property price register records the sale of the house and adjoining gate lodge at just over €2 million, that doesn’t include the adjoining 238 acres, where there is a two-acre walled garden and a forest. €3.5 million might seem expensive but Maguire can rest assured that the house, with more than 600 acres of adjoining land mostly in tillage, was previously on the market in 2021 for a whopping €9.25 million.
The barrister, who lives in Dublin 6, doesn’t intend to move into the property straight away, we hear, but instead plans to transform the estate into a native forestry and eco-tourism offering over the coming years. That’s certainly a new beginning.
Hanafin called to the Bar
Joining Maguire in the Bar of Ireland is Mary Hanafin, the former minister for education and social protection. The former Fianna Fáil TD and senator, who was until recently a local councillor, became one of the many former politicians plying their trade in the Four Courts last week when she was called to the Bar.
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Hanafin was an unsuccessful Fianna Fáil candidate for the Dún Laoghaire constituency at the last general election and chose not to run in the recent local election. If she needs to get the lie of the land in the courts, her brother, John, himself a former Fianna Fáil senator, is a junior counsel.
Who knows, she may even inspire some of the other politicians jumping ship in advance of the next general election to join her.
Mullooly’s mixed messages on NGOs
The Bar of Ireland can be a lucrative side gig for a politician, according to a declaration by former Clare TD Michael McNamara to the European Parliament. All MEPs are required to submit a statement of earnings when taking up office. McNamara listed his earnings in the past year at just over €10,000 a month from the Oireachtas in his role as a TD, €2,500 a month from farming and €3,180 a month from his work as a barrister. That’s a combined annual income of about €190,000, making him one of the few new MEPs who will actually be taking a pay cut in his new role.
Another new MEP, former jockey Nina Carberry, declared earnings of €761 monthly from Nina Carberry Racing Ltd, while Ciaran Mullooly, the former RTÉ midlands correspondent, lists a number of income streams. He declared about €5,000 a year from freelance journalism, €55,000 a year for a role as a tourism activator with Longford County Council under the EU Just Transition Fund scheme and €38,000 a year as a social inclusion officer with Roscommon Integrated Development Company, a Government-funded charity. The latter wouldn’t be one of the NGOs that Mullooly and his Independent Ireland colleagues want to defund, would it? “No,” he said. “That’s an EU Leader-funded project. We are talking about NGOs in the homeless and mental health areas where there are too many doing the same thing. We would review them and merge them to avoid duplication.”
Danny Healy-Rae’s quarry quarrel quantinues
Danny Healy-Rae, who reportedly rejected overtures from Independent Ireland to join the group earlier this year, also has plenty of outside interests, including a bar and a plant hire company. But a quarry he operates in rural Kerry has drawn the ire of An Taisce, the environmental watchdog with which the Kerry politician and his brother, Michael, have clashed on numerous occasions.
Healy-Rae’s company Sunville Construction was recently granted retention planning permission by Kerry County Council to continue operating a quarry on five acres in Crohane. But Ian Lumley of An Taisce has appealed the decision to An Bord Pleanála, arguing the quarry should have gone through an “appropriate assessment screening” given it is only 160m from a special area of conservation at Killarney National Park and the catchment area of the Caragh river.
“Allowing continued quarrying in this location would be both anomalous and injurious to the proper long-term management of this visually sensitive area,” Lumley concluded in his appeal.
Field of bad dreams
A word of caution for those travelling to the Aran Islands this summer. Another environmental NGO, Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE), warned last week about the water quality on Inis Mór. A main foul sewer at Kilronan public toilets, into which a number of connections are made throughout the village, is being discharged into a local field without any primary treatment.
FIE says this is unlicensed by the EPA and, according to Galway county council’s own reports, the discharge is creating “a cesspool of effluent which poses a very serious environmental and public health and safety issue”. FIE has warned that if the discharge does not cease by the end of August, it will initiate High Court action against Uisce Éireann, which has responsibility for the site.
Damo and Ivor’s quirky pigeon sideline
Andy Quirke, the comedian who inflicted Damo and Ivor on us, is now better known for his political views. Quirke, a son of arcade tycoon Richard Quirke, routinely castigates political parties and the “fake news” media on his social media channels, calling for RTÉ to be shut and the “corrupt” Government to be ousted, while labelling climate change and vaccines as “scams”. You get the picture. Less well-known is his day job as a pigeon breeder.
Quirke recently showed off a newly purchased loft for his birds on Facebook, with 30 new breeding boxes. His most successful bird, Mr Gold, has career winnings of €58,000, once finishing second in the 500km in the AGR Golden Algarve, one of the most prestigious races in Europe with €1 million in prize money.
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