The Most Bizarre Commercial Property Legal Case In The British Isles

For commercial property solicitors, every case involving a property dispute is important and needs to be carefully looked into, but one case in Ireland involving a disappearing house took decades to navigate, had circumstances so bizarre as to cause a mental breakdown and relied on an odd part of the law. 

 

The case of Presho vs Doohan involves the tiny community of Tory Island, the most remote inhabited island off the coast of Ireland. Neville Presho loved the area to the point that he bought a house on the island in 1982 and gave up his engineering job to become a documentary maker there. 

 

He would eventually settle down in New Zealand but retained the Toraigh house. He would receive an offer in 1992 to buy the house whilst it had been boarded up and secured. However, since the offer was a seventh of the asking price, he refused. 

 

Once he returned to the island in 1994 having received a letter that the house was in a dangerous condition, however, he noticed that his house had disappeared, replaced by a car park for a nearby hotel that had been constructed by Mr Patrick Doohan. 

 

The incident, which would lead to mental distress so profound that Mr Presho spent several periods in psychiatric care, would take 15 years to finally settle and unpack, in part due to the lack of cooperation with a police investigation by the inhabitants of Toraigh. 

 

It turned out that the house had not been damaged by a storm due to its metre-thick walls, but instead had been damaged by fire before being gradually demolished and removed over a year. 

 

Ultimately, the case was decided by the principle of unjust enrichment, where one party benefited financially at the expense of another in circumstances where other damages cannot be awarded. 

 

It was never proven although assumed by the civil court that Mr Doohan had, by virtue of owning the only JCB on the island, some involvement in the demolition of the house’s remains and was proven to have benefited from its destruction. 

 

Mr Presho would be entitled to a comparable house on the island or its market value, which would amount to €46,000 (£38,000) in total. 

 

Since 2009, when this decision was made, the case and the island have become infamous as one of the most unique, bizarre property cases in the British Isles, sometimes known simply as The House That Vanished.