Legal costs of up to €40,000 have been awarded against a local authority alleged to have "ambushed" four tenants who had been seeking for the past 20 years to buy their council homes.
Circuit Court President Mr Justice Esmond Smyth, in a reserved judgment, said Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, at the eleventh hour of a two-day Circuit Court trial, had contended the proceedings were a matter for the High Court.
Transferring the case to the High Court, Mr Justice Smyth said the plaintiffs contended, not unreasonably, that they had in effect been ambushed at the last moment.
Mr Thomas McDonald, Mr Hermon Wallace, Mr Gary Synott, and Mr John Dunleavy, who live in a four-apartment block of two-bedroomed maisonettes at Pearse Close, Sallynoggin, Co Dublin, had told the Circuit Court they had been negotiating in some cases for more than 20 years with the council.
They had asked the Circuit Civil Court for a declaration that they were entitled to buy their flats in line with the market price prevailing in 1979, or as determined by the court. They also sought an order preventing the council from charging a price relevant to today's highly-inflated market values.
Under the 1966 Housing Act provision had been made to enable local authority tenants to purchase their homes, a practice which later had become Government policy.
In 1998 a pilot scheme had been adopted by the council to enable the plaintiffs to buy their homes but the purchase prices had been determined at current market value which the plaintiffs claimed bore no relationship to their income and means.