Fianna Fáil TD John Lahart has found himself at the centre of a dispute between two neighbours after wrote a letter to Gardaí supporting a Dublin couple’s bid to continue their home extension during lockdown.

Gardaí gave the Rathfarnham couple the green light after receiving the letter – only to reverse the decision when a neighbour complained to the media about the situation.

On The Pat Kenny Show this morning the Dublin South West TD said he understands both sides of the dispute.

“Level Five restrictions are there for all of us,” he said. “Like everybody else, I take them but I’m fed up with them.

“I hate the stress they cause everybody, I think, at this stage and this is a story, I think, of the stresses for two different sets of people.”

Letter

He said TDs get queries on restrictions from the public every day and when he heard the couple’s story, he was “very taken and very persuaded by it.”

“There was a big hole, as I was told, in the back of the house,” he said. “It could be sorted by the delivery and installation of glazing and that, having teased out the Level Five construction restrictions, seemed to me to qualify.

“So, I wrote a later saying, as I understand it and as it is being presented to me, this seems to be an essential case and I think the resident in question got the letter stamped by Gardaí.”

Disruption

He said he didn’t realise that there were long “lead-in times for the installation of the glazing in question.”

“What I hadn’t factored in was that there are people working from home so they are there all day,” he said.

“Not only are they working from home, they have children who they are home schooling and who have to learn online.

“So, this caused a huge amount of disruption. I think the point on which the issue swung was that the lead-in time and preparatory work that needed to be done in order to prepare for the window to be installed was going to take considerably longer than, certainly, I had envisaged in the first case."

Level Five

Under Level Five restrictions, maintenance and repair works are permitted on residential homes – but only on an “emergency call-out basis.”

Deputy Lahart said it is “perfectly reasonable” for constituents to approach their TDs and noted that there is no official mechanism for deciding what is essential and what isn’t.

“There is no such forum,” he said. “You can’t write to NPHET and God love the Gardaí too, they are not engineers either and they are on a learning curve.

“I think even a forum would probably require the wisdom of Solomon on this. Ultimately people are in fraught circumstances and I was very taken by both cases put to me.”

It is believed Deputy Lahart contacted Gardaí to withdraw the letter once the controversy came to light.