Healy-Rae’s ‘Allsop house’ rented out to council
A PROPERTY bought by Michael Healy-Rae is being rented out to Kerry County Council.
The Kerry TD bought the three-bedroom house in Castleisland at an Allsop’s property auction in the RDS in February 2015, despite having previously protested at an earlier event by the same auctioneer in 2013.
Mr Healy-Rae paid out €52,500 for the semidetached home, which is one of more than a dozen properties declared by the TD in the 2015 register of interests, including eight houses, two apartments, three parcels of farmland, a service station with a Mace shop attached, and a storage facility. Last year, he also bought a building in Tralee that is currently under construction. The deputy has described his occupations as postmaster in Kilgarvan, politician, farmer, plant hire, and the owner of a shop and filling station.
Speaking to the Irish Mail on Sunday, Mr Healy-Rae said: ‘It’s rented to the council on a lease like, yeah. It’s rented like a lot of other places that I have. A lot of others aren’t rented out. Anything that I have, if you want to see what I have, look at my register of interests. Anything that I have to register, I have registered. It’s all there, everything is accounted for.’ The house in question was previously for sale in 2014 with an asking price of €79,000 but when the property failed to sell, the owner decided to auction it off through Allsop, a British company that specialises in offloading large volumes of properties, often under the control of banks or receivers.
In 2013, Michael Healy-Rae along with fellow TDs Mattie McGrath and Tom Fleming protested outside an Allsop auction in the Shelbourne Hotel. He reportedly said he was protesting at the Allsop auction because he wanted to support people whose homes were being taken by the banks.