The Attorney-General, Séamus Woulfe, failed to disclose a “false” and “misleading” order made by the former Manager of Wicklow County Council (WCC) when he compiled a report for the Government on the controversial compulsory purchase of lands in 2013. Woulfe, who was a senior counsel at the time and a prominent member of Fine Gael, was asked by then environment minister, Phil Hogan, in early 2013 to carry out a review of the proposal by WCC to compulsorily purchase lands at the Three Trout Stream, at Charlesland near Greystones. In the course of his review, Woulfe was provided with substantial documentation by WCC, including a copy of two Manager’s orders setting out the reasons for, and putting into legal effect, the CPO. The Manager’s orders, dated November 2003 and November 2004, stated that the Council required the land for social housing as it only had an “existing land bank of 0.5 hectares in the Greystones area”. The orders were signed by then Wicklow County Manager, Eddie Sheehy. This statement was “false” and “misleading” according to submissions made by a barrister acting for Wicklow Councillor, Tommy Cullen and former Councillor Barry Nevin in their successful High Court defamation action against Sheehy and WCC last year. In her detailed judgment, Justice Marie Baker found that the Councillors had been defamed by Sheehy and the Council in a press release issued on the day the Woulfe report was published in April 2013. She found that the content of the release showed that Sheehy and the Council had acted with malice and improper purpose towards the Councillors. Woulfe had concluded that “almost all of the concerns raised by the Councillors” which led to his review were “not well founded or are misconceived”. This comment was repeated in a statement issued by Hogan and the Department of the Environment and in the press release issued by the Council following publication of the Woulfe report. However, the Council went further and accused the Councillors of wasting up to €200,000 in public monies by raising their “allegations” which prompted the commissioning by Hogan of the Woulfe review. Judge Baker found that the Woulfe report was “not evidence that the Councillors were wrong or acted in bad faith” in raising their concerns. She found that the Councillors had been wrongly accused of being responsible for “wasting money at a time when money was scarce” and awarded them damages of €20,000 each. She also said the claim that there was a €200,000 loss of public monies was an exaggeration on the part of the Council. Woulfe was paid €62,000 in fees for his work. In her judgment, Judge Baker also referred to the extensive documentation available to Woulfe for his review, but withheld from the Councillors, including the two Manager’s orders and various reports which confirmed that the Three Trout Stream lands were prone to flooding and unsuited to social housing. She specifically referenced the documents which proved that the Council owned a site of over 10 hectares (22 acres), zoned residential for housing and adjoining the Three Trout Stream lands. In his report, Woulfe also referred to the existing lands owned by the Council in the Greystones area. However, he did not point out the discrepancy between this fact and the statement in the Manager’s orders that the Council only had a landbank of 0.5 hectares in the area. The November 2004 order formed the legal basis for the CPO and the seizure of lands from the landowner and another local man who used the land to graze horses. Although Woulfe was called as a witness for Sheehy and WCC he was not asked about the incorrect assertion in the Manager’s orders. the plaintiffs only obtained copies of the orders after Woulfe had given his evidence. In his closing submission, Mark Harty SC, acting for the two politicians, said that the Manager’s order stating that the Council had a landbank of just 0.5 hectares in the area was “false” and “misleading”. “This unequivocal statement in an official statutory document was simply false. Certainly, it was misleading”, Harty submitted. “The situation is more serious given the core basis of the decision to confirm the CPO by an Bord Pleanála which is that it satisfied that the Council had established the need for housing and the need to buy land for housing”. It was also the basis for the State’s decision to seize the land from two citizens against their wishes. Judge Baker also raised questions about the conclusions made by Woulfe in his report, in particular in relation to his suggestion that “almost all of the concerns (of the two councillors) are not well founded or are misconceived”. Judge Baker said that “it was not true to say that on the information they had that the plaintiffs raised unnecessary or irresponsible concerns without cause”. The High Court judgment by Judge Baker overturned an earlier decision by the Circuit Court in April 2014 which dismissed the defamation claims. In January, Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, asked the Housing and Environment minister, Eoghan Murphy, if he would now remove the Woulfe report and the statement issued by his predecessor Phil Hogan when it was published, from the Department’s website in light of the High Court judgment. The Sinn Féin deputy suggested that Woulfe did not “establish the fact of his statement that ‘almost all of the concerns [raised by the named members of Wicklow County Council] are not well founded or are misconceived’”. McDonald also called for the establishment of a new independent investigation into the CPO of the lands at Charlesland in 2004. Murphy replied: “The public statement of my predecessor and the associated report were not the subject of the High Court judgment…The case in question concerned a statement made in a press release issued by the Council on 23 April 2013. The plaintiffs brought proceedings against the Council claiming that the last paragraph of the press release was defamatory towards them. This paragraph stated that a delay in sanctioning a loan to purchase a
