Tag: Patrick McGreal

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.