Web Summit cofounder Paddy Cosgrave buys €1.8m Donegal manor

Paddy Cosgrave, one of the founders of the Web Summit, has bought a €1.8 million Georgian manor in Rossnowlagh, Co Donegal, close to where his wife, Faye Dinsmore, grew up.

Cosgrave and Dinsmore, a former model who owns a knitwear business, purchased Coolmore Manor House, formerly known as Coolmore House, shortly before Christmas.

The house, on a bluff overlooking the beach at Rossnowlagh, played host to the American-Irish author Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind, who reputedly wrote part of the bestselling book while staying in the Georgian pile for a few weeks in the 1920s while researching her Irish roots.

The house, on 11 acres and with a separate coach house divided into two self-contained units, was placed on the market in 2018 by its then Swiss owners but failed to sell. Its price dropped to €1.8 million in 2021. The property price register records a price of €1.42 million for the house on December 19th, but this figure does not include the value of the land attached to the property, with the final sale price closer to the €1.8 million asking figure.

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The house was restored in the noughties by Barry Sharkey, a Donegal businessman, and his wife, Susanna Friel, who bought it without running water. The main house now extends to 330sq m/3,550sq ft, while the coach house measures a further 267sq m/2,875sq ft. There is a walled garden, with a Corso sauna, a Canadian pine hot tub, stables and an American-style barn.

Cosgrave, who grew up in Co Wicklow, and Dinsmore, originally from Ballintra, already spend much of their time in Co Donegal. The couple, who met at Trinity College Dublin and married in 2016, have a son, Cloud Valentine.

[ A house, seven friends and a baby: at home with Faye Dinsmore ]

Last year Cosgrave won a Residential Tenancies Board case against a landlord who tried to remove him from a €3,700-a-month property in Palmerstown Park, in Dartry in Dublin, alleging Cosgrave had breached a series of obligations as a tenant.

Aidan Hall, the landlord, claimed Cosgrave accommodated more people than permitted in the house, installed CCTV without permission, changed locks without consent, and removed two trees from the rear garden without his knowledge.

The board found that the landlord had failed to prove the house was being occupied by more people than Cosgrave and his family and found the removed tree had been “irreparably damaged” in a storm in September 2018.

The board also ruled that Hall had given Cosgrave an inadequate amount of time, 28 days, to fix the alleged defects. It found that changing the locks and installing CCTV were a breach of Cosgrave’s obligations as a tenant but awarded no damages, as “there was no evidence put forward on behalf of the landlord of the cost of re-changing the locks, and no estimate or quotation of the cost of removing the CCTV and making good”.