Irishman Wins €46,000 After Island Home Disappears

SHAWN POGATCHNIK

DUBLIN (AP) — A Northern Ireland filmmaker has won €46,000 ($69,000) in damages after a judge ruled that his Irish island home was transformed into a parking lot while he was overseas.

The case of 61-year-old Neville Presho captured national attention because of the apparent callousness of his treatment at the hands of the insular 170-strong community of remote Tory Island. Police investigating the vanished house found only a wall of silence.

Presho successfully sued developer and hotelier Patrick Doohan after he returned from New Zealand to find no trace of his six-bedroom property beside the island's harbor. In its place stood a septic tank and parking lot for Doohan's newly built 12-room hotel, which remains the only one today on Tory.

Presho said Tuesday that his mid-19th century stone-built home had become "a car park surrounded by boulders to prevent inebriated drivers from driving into the harbor."

High Court Justice Roderick Murphy ruled that he couldn't determine who set fire to Presho's property in 1993 or knocked down its stone walls in the following months while Presho, his wife and two children were living in New Zealand, 11,600 miles (18,700 kilometers) away.