Sir, – Justine McCarthy’s normally well-targeted criticisms seem a trifle unresearched in her article headed “Seriously Shane, is Mary Lou’s house really a mansion?” (Opinion, October 28th). She further scoffs scornfully, when pointing out that Shane Ross “describes the accommodation as incorporating a ‘Dining Hall’.”
Unfortunately, I cannot claim that “Dining Hall” was my own brainchild as a suitable description of the particular room which your columnist picked out for special disdain. If she had inspected the publicly available planning application submitted by Mary Lou McDonald’s husband, Martin Lanigan, she would have discovered the origin of the offending “Dining Hall” description.
The elaborate planning documents include a room, rather grandly but very specifically, described in the application itself as a “Dining Hall”. The applicant’s choice of words, not mine. My biography of Mary Lou simply, but accurately, reflects their wishes.
Justine’s effort to suggest it was I who had carefully selected the word “mansion” to describe the house is equally wide of the mark.
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If she had unearthed the two previous articles that have covered the couple’s originally modest Cabra bungalow, she would have found that one refers to it as their “11-room detached villa”; the other as no less than “a mansion fit for a queen”.
Plagiarism and lack of original thought, rather than exaggeration, might have been a fairer charge in critical comment on this chapter of my biography of Mary Lou.
Nevertheless, The Irish Times and Justine’s own willingness to discuss the matter openly are very welcome.
Neither has been silenced by fear of a threat of legal action.
– Yours, etc,
SHANE ROSS,
Enniskerry,
Co Wicklow.