Priory Hall residents may be lucky ones before the law

Date Published: {J}

You’ll forgive if I express somewhat mixed reactions when I hear and read all of the publicity relating to the predicament in which the residents of Priory Hall find themselves in recent times.

Their lives have been a misery in latter weeks, but they at least have caught the eye of the courts: Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns opens their cases every Friday for special mention . . . and it is a joy to hear him speak from the Bench in the style of trenchant terms which should have been applied to so many of the developments of the boom.

When you catch the eye of a judge, you have some chance of getting action and some sort of resolution date, as distinct from the morass of clinging mire which entails years of correspondence, endless letters referring to ‘yours of above date’, and the feeling of everyone going nowhere.

Perhaps Dickens put it best with his references to the endless twists in a case he called ‘Jarndyce v Jarndyce’ in Bleak House. Eventually, everyone forgot the origins of the case, but it kept grinding onwards taking on a life of its own.

Reason I say the Priory Hall residents have been ‘lucky’ is that there are literally hundreds of developments around the country where people daily encounter open sewers, live electric wires hanging from walls, half-finished houses which are a threat to playing children, and a great silence when it comes to someone – anyone! – expressing a willingness to do anything about the devastation.

Mr Justice Kearns taking Priory Hall ‘under his judicial wing’ reminds me of the early years of my career as a reporter when one of the recurring events on the calendar for any young cub reporter involved covering the Circuit Court.

Presiding at the court was Judge John Durcan, the father of poet Paul Durcan and with the book of poetry Daddy, Daddy dedicated to the father. Incidentally, can I say that I thought the book too intrusive and perhaps even a little harsh in dealing with a man of immense intellect, a man who took his Bench responsibilities perhaps a little too seriously, and who became more reclusive in latter years on the Bench.

Judge Durcan took an occasional break for a few holes of golf in Galway Golf Club after a sitting, but he was a solitary player, turning his car into a copse of trees immediately inside the main gate. On one occasion when I invited him to join me on the first, he gave me that tiny smile, complained of what he called ‘tralach’ in one of his wrists and excused himself, waving me onwards, a solitary figure by choice.

Occasionally, a person would appear in front of Judge Durcan in a civil suit – perhaps something as simple as repossession of any one of a number of the ubiquitous Volkswagens, which were indeed proving to be ‘the people’s car’, though some found it difficult to keep up the payments to lenders, Bowmaker.

The envelopes with the red type on them became a familiar sight in many a home at month’s end but, if you could convince Judge Durcan that you simply did not have the money for a defence lawyer in a repossession case, you had a fearsome supporter on your side.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.