A DISPUTE over public access to the grounds of the ancestral home of 1916 leader Constance Markievicz has escalated.
The owners of Lissadell House in Co Sligo have accused Sligo county council of taking sides in the dispute over alleged rights of way across the estate.
In an open letter to Sligo county manager Hubert Kearns, lawyers Edward Walsh and his wife Constance Cassidy, who own the house and surrounding grounds, have also accused the local authority and its executive of putting Lissadell “at the bottom of the agenda”.
The couple claim that documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed secret meetings between the council executive and a lobby organisation in the dispute, the Lissadell Action Group, which insisted that locals had a right of way across the estate for generations. The couple, who say there is no public right of way, claim members of the group are also council employees and thus the meetings compromised the executive’s impartiality.
Lissadell House and its gardens were closed to the public in January, and 11 staff let go when the owners served notice of High Court proceedings on the council in a move to clear up the issue of rights of way. The owners, who bought Lissadell and much of its furniture and fittings for €4.55 million in 2003, said in their letter that it “beggars belief” they cannot get a response from the council to their requests for information on its links to the action group. They also claimed the council’s continued failure to enter a defence to the High Court action, despite being given extra time, was “undermining” the ongoing restoration work at Lissadell.
Estate manager Isobel Cassidy, sister of Constance Cassidy, said yesterday: “Lissadell does not have the luxury of fannying around for the next year because it will be dead by then. The place is on a maintenance-only basis at the moment.”
But Sligo County Council yesterday rejected the claim that it was not treating the matter with urgency. A spokesman said attempts to arrange a meeting with the owners as far back as April last year were unsuccessful. When a meeting was finally held in January, two proposals by the council aimed at resolving the issue were rejected.
The spokesman added that the council was preparing its High Court defence and this will be filed as soon as possible, but “the council remains of the view that a resolution to the issue by agreement is preferable and possible”.