A JUDGE has warned people to “think hard and fast” before locking horns in legal disputes with neighbours over a few inches of ground space.
Judge Jacqueline Linnane was dealing with legal costs in a dispute between next-door neighbours Jennifer and Simon Barry and Valerie and Noel Mulvaney about the rebuilding of a boundary wall.
Judge Linnane told Tara Byrne, counsel for the Mulvaneys, that her clients had not, as claimed, encroached on the Barrys’ garden after demolishing and rebuilding a wall between their properties.
Although she directed the Barrys to pay the legal costs of a one-day trial in the Circuit Civil Court, both sides will be responsible for their own other significant costs relating to the boundary row.
She said the back garden at the Mulvaney home in St Brendan’s Avenue, Artane, Dublin, backed on to the rear and side garden of the Barry household at Measc Green.
When the Mulvaneys demolished and started rebuilding the wall the neighbours disagreed over an area ranging from as little as two inches up to a maximum of eight and a half inches.
Judge Linnane said Jennifer O’Connor Barry and her husband Simon had been seeking a declaration of trespass and wanted the new wall to be removed.
She said she favoured expert evidence called by the Mulvaneys and was satisfied their new wall had been built on the line of the old wall and foundation and had not encroached on the Barry property.