The High Court upheld a District Court decree requiring Patrick Halpin and Ann Keane, trading as the Aberdeen Lodge, to pay €75,195.12 in rates for 2013 to 2017, plus costs. It did not decide whether the premises qualified as domestic premises under the Valuation Act 2001.
The appeal, brought by way of case stated, concerned a decree granted by District Court Judge John Brennan on 16 January 2018. The High Court substituted a different legal question for those posed by the District Court and answered it in the affirmative: whether the District Court was right in law to grant the decree.
The rates claim was brought by John Clarke, a rate collector for Dublin City Council. The operators’ defence was that the property at 53/55 Park Avenue, Sandymount, was domestic premises and exempt from rates. The District Court had found that the couple lived there with their two children, that it had 16 en suite bedrooms, and that it was used as a bed and breakfast. It granted the decree for the claimed rates and €1,000 plus VAT in costs.
The High Court said that under the 2001 Act, a property on the valuation list remained rateable unless its valuation was successfully challenged or revised under the Act, or a decision in the valuation process was challenged by judicial review. It held that it was no longer a defence to a rates demand to assert in the District Court proceedings that a listed property was a domestic dwelling.
The court said earlier decisions concerning domestic dwellings under the previous statutory regime remained relevant to deciding whether premises were domestic, but that question had to be raised through the procedures in the 2001 Act. The operators had not challenged the valuation or sought its revision for the years in question. The judgment records that they applied for a revision on 21 November 2017.
The court noted that the property had been registered as a guesthouse until 2012 and operated by a company, which paid rates for that year. After a receiver was appointed in July 2012, the guesthouse closed and its registration lapsed. The second-named appellant later used the premises as a B&B without registering it under the Tourist Traffic Acts.
The High Court did not need to determine the operators’ separate argument that the appeal was an impermissible challenge to the rate’s validity, or to answer the District Court’s questions about the premises’ domestic or commercial character, the property’s location, its turnover or the fee paid to one appellant. It concluded that those questions arose from a defence that could not be advanced in the rates summons.