The Dundrum “Injunction” is a Sham

If you have previously heard about a legal action brought in the High Court by “residents of Dundrum” in Co. Tipperary at the end of July, you probably heard the story like this. A group of outspoken residents of a small Tipperary village filed an injunction to try and stop Dundrum House, a shuttered hotel contracted to house Ukrainian refugees since 2022, from becoming a hybrid accommodation centre that also houses non-Ukrainian refugees, or “International Protection Applicants”, as the government insists on calling them. They submitted over 280 affidavits expressing their “legitimate concerns”, but the judge denied their application for an ex parte emergency injunction because they did not persuade him there was any emergency to address.

The problem is that’s not what happened, and every news outlet that’s publicised the story this way has either missed or ignored copious red flags that should have alerted to them to the real story.

No one from Dundrum filed an injunction in the High Court. A man called Patrick McGreal from Westmeath had already filed his own injunction against a statutory instrument that allows the government to build temporary accommodation for displaced persons without going through the usual planning process. He then attempted to file an ex partie emergency injunction against Dundrum House, supported by affidavits from the protesters, but without any residents of Dundrum as applicants. The Dundrum protesters – many of whom are not in fact residents of Dundrum at all – also separately tried to join McGreal’s injunction against the statutory instrument, even though it’s not clear to me the statutory instrument in question is even at issue in the case of Dundrum House.

I don’t know if those protesters even realised that’s what they were doing, because it was all the hare-brained scheme of McGreal himself, a vegetable farmer and conspiracy theorist who took the protesters for a ride by promising them a nonsense legal solution to their woes based on his own crank theories and magical thinking. He wasted their time, effort and money on a frivolous legal action that never had any chance of succeeding, and now he’s using the notoriety he’s gained from his role to raise money for further vexatious litigation.

Worse still, four elected Tipp representatives – three councillors and TD Mattie McGrath – lended this effort their official support without seeking any independent legal advice or doing any due diligence to vet Mr. McGreal’s credibility. All were asked to comment on this story, and all refused but one, who immediately changed his mind once I made the scope of the story apparent. These elected officials helped a charlatan mislead their constituents, and now they’re hiding from the responsbility.

The protest outside the gates of Dundrum House has rumbled on for months now, but the entire story of the injunction took place over a single week.

On Wednesday 24th of July, members of the protest group announced a surprise meeting in Dundrum, unrelated to another held the previous night. As announced by two regular spokespeople for the campaign, Fiona Kennedy and Andrea Crowe, in an interview on Tipp Mid-West Radio, the meeting was only for “locals” of Dundrum “and the hinterlands”, and concerned a new legal option they were considering.

On Sunday 28th of July, the group held a mass signing and witnessing of affidavits to be submitted to the High Court, with the public support and participation of Mattie McGrath and three county councillors. Two of them – Liam Browne and John O’Heney – are newly-elected independent councillors for Cashel-Tipperary LEA, where Dundrum lies, while the third, Richie Molloy, is a veteran councillor from Clonmel and longstanding ally of Mattie McGrath. To the best of my knowledge, McGrath, Browne and Molloy only submitted affidavits of their own. But O’Heney, in his capacity as a Commissioner of Oaths, witnessed them alongside a Tipp Town solicitor named Colin Morrissey, according to a post on O’Heney’s official Facebook page. Mr. Morrissey denied he or his firm, English Leahy, had any legal involvement in the case when I contacted him, but otherwise declined to comment for this story and did not clarify whether Cllr. O’Heney was referring to a different solicitor named Colin Morrissey.

On Monday 29th of July, a delegation from the group travelled to the High Court for what they presumably thought was a case of their own. They did a photo op with Gript, who interviewed Mattie McGrath and Alison De Vere Hunt, owner of Cashel Mart and one of the several non-residents of Dundrum involved in both the campaign and the injunction. By all accounts, the efforts of the protesters in court that day were Trojan. In an interview, Mr. McGreal described to me how they immediately set to work sorting the affidavits into bundles when a clerk told them he couldn’t accept all of the over 300 affidavits they had brought. They reportedly spent the whole day in court and, according to Andrea Crowe, whose family owned Dundrum House before it went into receivership in 2014, so did Mattie McGrath.

On Tuesday 30th of July, they returned for a second day, as did Mattie, with proceedings carrying on long into the night. In the end, Justice David Holland found no case had been made to grant the emergency injunction, especially in proceedings where only one side of the dispute was represented. He affirmed that residents have no legal right to vet or veto who lives in their communities and noted one of several obviously racist claims made in the affidavits: “It is saying that International Protection Applicants are more likely to be burglars than those staying as guests at the hotel or Ukrainian refugees staying there. I lend no weight to that assertion.”

Some coverage of the “case” – even that’s a strong word for what happened here, legally speaking – noted the oddity of details like that, or the fact that all applications were made by a farmer from Westmeath, not by anyone living in or near Dundrum, but evidently didn’t dig into McGreal anymore than Mattie and the councillors did. I feel confident in making that claim because it took less than no effort for me to uncover everything I’m about to tell you about Patrick McGreal. His account went mysteriously dead sometime on or after Thursday 26th of August (more on that later), but until then, almost every detail of McGreal’s magical adventures in and around the Irish legal system were documented extensively on his Twitter, including in a literal “Highlights” tab for ease of navigation. He even helpfully compiled this dossier of filings and rulings that collectively lays out what you might call his origin story, the series of events that took Mr. McGreal from directly selling and delivering his own produce to what can only be described as a years-long campaign of legal harrassment against an ever-expanding list of public officials and civil servants, beginning with Westmeath County Council and now including, at time of writing, the Office of the Information Commissioner, District Judge Court Bernadette Owens and David McEntee, solicitor and brother of Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, among many, many others.

Now, I’m not a solicitor or a barrister. The closest I’ve come to legal training is a week’s work experience at a law office in secondary school where I was basically just left in a room and given old briefs to read. But they gave me too few for how fast I could read as a young man, so I would read them over and over again, and in the end, I basically spent a week teaching myself to tolerate reading dry repetitive legalese. I’m not fluent in the law or anything, but I have the stamina to trudge on through the slog of actually reading legal documents, which is often half the battle with this stuff. I have read McGreal’s dossier, and I’ve read the Workplace Relations Commission decision about the underlying HAP (Housing Assistance Payment) dispute that started it all. I still find it hard to articulate exactly what Patrick seems to think happened, but this is my impression of the reality of the situation:

Patrick McGreal had been in receipt of a discretionary HAP increase of 20% since 2018, but when he added his children to his application in 2021, he was falsely told by a Westmeath County Council official it might affect his receipt of the discretionary increase, even though the increase is actually dependent on the percentage of your income you spend on rent. The official also inappropriately expressed assumptions about the living situation of his children – whom he co-parents with his ex – and the upshot of this exchange was his children weren’t added to his application until 2022. While McGreal’s payment was increased accordingly, he also lost the discreationary increase because his income-to-rent ratio dropped so he became ineligible. He took Westmeath County Council to the WRC because he believed they’d actually taken the increase away because he added his children to his application. The WRC found he was incorrect – and McGreal told me when I interviewed him he does not dispute the WRC ruling – but also backdated the increase he did receive to the date of his initial application in 2021. It seems like the story should end there.

However, before the WRC case was adjudicated, McGreal also began seeking all records on himself and the decision-making process around his HAP payment from Westmeath County Council via Freedom of Information request. I imagine he was looking for proof he’d been discriminated against, and when he didn’t find it, he decided the council were concealing records and lying about not being able to find any more. He appealed the decision to the Office of the Information Commissioner, but before the OIC ruled on it, the council did produce more records, and released them to him. When the OIC ruled on his appeal months later – after giving him a chance to withdraw it given the likelihood he would lose – they upheld the original decision. Even though they did produce more records after initially saying they couldn’t find any more, McGreal didn’t just have to show the decision was factually incorrect, but that it wasn’t the result of a reasonable, good faith effort to find all the records. He then appealed the OIC decision to the High Court, who ruled against him, so he appealed the High Court decision to the Court of Appeal, who ruled against him, so now he’s appealing that decision to the Supreme Court.

Underlying these appeals, and an array of other legal actions against Westmeath County Council, their solicitor David McEntee, and dozens of individual public officials and civil servants, was a growing belief by McGreal that these adverse rulings were part of a vast conspiracy against him. He put notices online offering “up to €1000” for “information leading to the disruption of Westmeath County Council criminal organisation and the arrest or conviction of” McEntee and council employees, with their names and photos. In another notice, he accused public servants at Westmeath County Council of “700+ crimes…over the last 24 months”. In July, he announced his intention to carry out a citizen’s arrest of David McEntee, warning there would be “no quarter afforded to criminal public, civil, government law & judicial servants”, though I am given to understand he didn’t do so in the end. That’s probably because citizen’s arrests aren’t really a thing in Ireland – they’re technically permissible in narrow circumstances, but if you biff it, you’re just kidnapping someone and they can sue you – though legal reality is not really a concern for Patrick.

It’s time to talk about legal conspiracism.

Legal conspiracism is my preferred term for what is usually called “pseudolaw“, by analogy to “pseudoscience”. Pseudolaw is most commonly associated with the “sovereign citizen” or “freemen of the land” movements, who essentially claim you can only be bound by statutory law if you consent to it first. They think the only “real law” is what they call “common law”, which has nothing to do with the actual legal concept of common law, but essentially just means the non-aggression principle: absolute control over your person and property, your rights end where my face and fence begin, no one can tell me what to do unless I signed a contract. The appeal of this thinking is obvious, and pseudolegal arguments are commonly used by people trying to get out of paying taxes and child support or to stop evictions or repossessions. These efforts inevitably fail, and at time of writing, no court anywhere in the world has accepted pseudolegal arguments.

The reason I prefer the term “legal conspiracism” to “pseudolaw” is pseudoscientific belief can be held without conspiratorial belief, while I think pseudolegal belief necessarily entails conspiratorial belief. A lot of these movements have conspiracism built into the foundation of their beliefs – the Reichsbürger movement in Germany claim the German Reich never fell and the current republic is illegitimate – but all pseudolaw becomes conspiracy theory once put into practice, because conspiracy is the only way to rationalise the unanimous refusal of any court ever to accept pseudolegal arguments. You can see this process happen as you read through Patrick’s documentation of his FOI appeals: he almost never argues any actual point of law, instead accusing officials who found against him of lies, deceit and trickery. What legal conspiracism ultimately amounts to is a steadfast belief you have discovered a cheat code for the legal system, and the only reason you can’t get whatever you want in the courts is there’s a conspiracy to deny the truth.

All of which is to say: absolutely nothing in the Dundrum “injunction” is based in legal reality, and if McGreal were able to obtain a favourable result in court with his arguments, he would literally be the first person to ever do so. It was not a legitimate legal effort made in anything resembling good faith, and I am gobsmacked to have to be the one to explain that to people after weeks of coverage by both local and national media.

I attended a public meeting in Dundrum called by the organisers of the protest on Friday 2nd of August, a couple of days after the injunction was thrown out of the High Court, meant to provide an update from Patrick on the legal side of the campaign. McGreal read to them from a folder he’d compiled that he presented as a guide to carrying out a citizen’s arrest of the asylum seekers and the bus drivers bringing them to Dundrum House. One of the protest leaders, Ross Heffernan, presented this folder to gardaí when asylum seekers arrived on the 13th of August. The Journal covered this meeting too, and describe how Cllr. Liam Browne challenged Patrick once bus drivers were mentioned as targets:

McGreal’s claims drew derision from one local councillor. Liam Browne, an independent who was elected for the first time in the June local elections, said McGreal and others needed to be “careful” with their language.

“I’m going to have to stop you there,” Browne said, “A bus driver has not brought people into the state, they’re moving people around the state.”

Browne, who said he was against the housing of asylum seekers in Dundrum House Hotel, warned that locals can’t hold such suspicions about new arrivals in Dundrum not possessing identity documents.

“I want to use legislation that will work…if I can pick that out of you in five seconds then it won’t last in court,” Browne continued. “If we try to make a citizen’s arrest at the gates of Dundrum it will be thrown out [of court].”

It is a deeply ironic exchange, because Cllr. Browne evidently couldn’t pick out the dozens of red flags in the injunction effort that meant it didn’t last in court. When I asked Cllr. Browne who requested he participate in the injunction, he said “no one”, and that he “investigated the merits of attaching an affidavit, and did so, on the basis of [his] belief that the current exemption to the Planning Acts in relation to refugee/asylum accommodation, by way of Statutory Instrument, has created a parallel planning system, and therefore undermines the concept that all citizens are treated equally before the law”. He also stressed this point while speaking at the meeting, saying he believed this should be the grounds of any future case. He may have come to this belief independently, but it is worth noting it is a belief he shares with Patrick McGreal, and which forms part of McGreal’s own case for an injunction against the same statutory instrument.

I don’t necessarily blame the Dundrum protesters for falling for McGreal’s nonsense: law is often needlessly complex specifically so people have to hire lawyers to navigate it for them, and it’s fucked up that justice has a paywall. But the fact that a TD and three councillors were apparently either duped by this nonsense, or went along with it despite knowing it was crap, should raise some serious questions about their conduct, particularly given Deputy McGrath is a legislator and Cllr. O’Heney is the Commissioner for Oaths who witnessed the affidavits. Our elected representatives are the people we entrust with the power to shape the law, and it’s not good enough for them to put their names to this effort, submit affidavits of their own and promote their involvement online and in the media, then wash their hands of it all once it came crashing down.

Mattie stopped responding to my requests for comment, and all my emails, for that matter, months ago, when I was writing my first piece on Clonmel Concerned Residents and his involvement with them. Cllrs. Molloy and O’Heney did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Cllr. Browne initially responded to a request for comment, but when I clarified some misconceptions he had – including that he had “attached [him]self to an action brought by ‘the residents of Dundrum village’, not an action brought by Mr. McGreal” – he told me he felt I was “more interested in writing an article about Patrick McGreal than about Dundrum House” and that it wouldn’t add anything to this piece to comment further. He also said he had “never even had a conversation with Mr. McGreal”, excepting, I suppose, the lengthy conversation he had with him at the meeting I attended.

None of them, including Browne, addressed the question of whether they had sought any independent legal advice before participating, and Browne confirmed he made no efforts to vet Patrick’s credibility.

I am a vocal critic of the “No to Dundrum” campaign, as they recently referred to themselves, and I make no secret of or apology for that. I believe their campaign is motivated by racism, dressed up in the language of concern about services, and I believe that because if you give this campaign any scrutiny, the prevalence of bigoted and conspiratorial beliefs about asylum seekers among this protest is readily apparent. I appreciate it’s easy for me to say this from inside Tipperary Facebook, where I regularly see some of them post crazy shit without even looking for it. But they have signs at their blockade that say “Protect our children” and “Keep our children safe”, and they mean “safe from asylum seekers”, because they view them as a threat to their children’s safety, for racist and conspiracist reasons.

But it genuinely brings me no pleasure to tell you that those protesters were taken for a ride, and that they wasted time, energy and money on something completely pointless because at least some of them were misled by a conspiracist huckster. McGreal told me they signed 301 affidavits, and a poster advertising the signing told people to bring €20 stamp duty each. Mr. McGreal did not reply to further requests for comment, including on the total legal costs and who paid them, after discovering I had already been publicly critical of him and the Dundrum protesters on Twitter and threatening me with a defamation suit if I wrote this piece. But 301 affidavits at €20 a pop is €6020, so thousands were wasted just on the affidavits, not all of which were even submitted in the end. There aren’t even 301 people living in Dundrum if you don’t count the residents of Dundrum House, which no one ever does, for some reason. The core members of the protest group proper seem to number somewhere between 45 and 70 people at this point: most of the people who signed these affidavits were supporters with no understanding of the legal details, or lack thereof, doing so because they trusted the campaign leaders and their elected representatives. I’ve only had hostile communications from anyone from the protest – including my sixth or seventh frivolous threat of defamation since May – but I have tried repeately to tell them McGreal misled them, not only because his legal conspiracism is a load of nonsense, but because he knew from experience the effort would fail.

Incidentally, before Patrick’s Twitter was deleted, he was advertising a “Citizens Arrest of Public Servants at Westmeath County Council” on Eventbrite, though the event had been postponed by the time I saw it, and it’s now been deleted. However, the Twitter account of his new “company”, Private Prosecutions Ireland, is still live and advertising its “legal services”, as is its website. He also still has a gofundme up, where he’s raised €955 for a “Campaign for Consitituonal Rights”, on top of €780 he previously raised for “Private Prosecutions Ireland”. He has been using the legitimacy and notoriety he gained from the Dundrum injunction to not only raise money, but spread his nonsense further: members of both Clonmel Concerned Residents and Coolock Says No have filed their own magic injunctions, and I’m sure they won’t be the last.

We’ve seen this before in Ireland, when “sovereign citizen” and “freemen of the land” beliefs blossomed on the fringes of the anti-austerity movement in the early of 2010s, resulting in hundreds of people trying and failing to use them in court cases to escape debt or eviction. I can’t blame “No to Dundrum” for falling for this nonsense, but I can absolutely blame politicians who should have known better than to support it and journalists who should have known better than to report it as a legitimate legal endavour. Conspiracist belief is a feature of life now, in Ireland as much as anywhere, and it didn’t come out of nowhere: it’s been festering since the crash and exploding since the pressure cooker of lockdown fried all our brains.

We need our press and our political leaders to stop sticking their heads in the sand and waiting for this all to blow over. We need scrutiny. There is a benefit to not giving this stuff attention when the attention can feed it, especially because making a spectacle of themselves is part of how people spread these beliefs. But the vacuum of reliable information and frank talk also allows bullshit to spread unopposed, and it certainly doesn’t help when elected officials endorse it. I would also be remiss not to mention that two episodes of Tipp Today that covered the case are unavailable to listen on their website: the 31st of July episode was never uploaded, despite a post that said “technical difficulties” would delay its publication by a day, and the 30th was taken down without explanation. I suspect I’m not the only person who noticed there was something dodgy about all this, though Tipp FM have continued to cover the “No to Dundrum” campaign positively.

At least six grand was wasted on this frivolous legal effort, and a TD spent two full days in the High Court supporting it. Explaining themselves is literally the least our representatives could do. I’m hopeful in publishing this, a journalist they can’t simply ignore will put some questions to them and make them either account for themselves or let them waffle their credibility away. Either way, the people of Tipperary deserve an answer.