Local elected representatives in Donegal have strongly criticised the decision by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) to award a new two year contract to Peppard Investments for the accommodation of up to 150 International Protection applicants in the Mulroy Woods hotel in Milford.
Speaking on Highland Radio this morning, Councillor Declan Meehan echoed Sinn Féin TD Padraig Mac Lochlainn’s claim that contrary to the briefing note issued by the Department there had been no consultation and therefore no discussion of extra pressures on schools, local transport etc.
Mac Lochlainn is also quoted in this morning’s Tir Conaill Sentinel as claiming that the decision to use the hotel as a Direct Provision centre was “all about making a small number of providers more millions.” The same of course could be said of Vesada Private the company whose acquisition of two Bun Beag hotels now devoted to this new industry was welcomed with much acclaim by Mac Lochlainn’s fellow SF TD Pearse Doherty.
Until his election, Councillor Meehan was a director of the Donegal Local Development Company which has been supportive of the placing of Ukrainian and other refugees in the county.
The providers in this instance, Peppard Investments, have indeed already done well from the accommodation of asylum seekers and some of its principals are names that will already be familiar to Gript readers through their involvement in other entities that had wet their beaks in the multibillion tax payer funded trough.
Peppard, with an address at Doughcloyne Industrial Estate, in Wilton, Cork have been the registered owners of Mulroy Woods hotel since October 31 2023. The two registered directors of Peppard are Tony O’Neill and John Crean. The company is jointly owned by Pepperfield Investments and Arderin Investments. Peppard, which owns the Zurich House centre in Blackrock, county Dublin, drew down more than €1 million in accommodation payments last year.
Pepperfield is owned by members of the O’Neill family. Arderin is wholly owned by John Crean. Tony O’Neill and Crean are also directors of Kintrona Limited. This is the company which had bought St. John’s Wood in Tallaght, a former retail centre that IPAS confirmed had been offered by Kintrona as an accommodation centre.
Crean and Tony O’Neill are also directors of Next Week which is in the top ten of overall beneficiaries of the payments. Next Week is also owned by Crean and the O’Neills.
A former director of Kintrona, Brendan Moran, was until December 2020 a director of Aperee – the nursing homes company whose former homes at Callan and elsewhere have been the subject of speculation regarding future use. The former owner of Aperee, David O’Shea, was also a Kintrona director until November last year. The three owners of Kintrona Limited with equal shares are City Quarter Capital, Lebrun Private and Red Quartz.
The O’Neills and Crean are connected via a company called Neix which has a half share in Kintrona Holdings to Millbank Trustees which is registered as wholly owned by Carol Dwyer. Dwyer is or has been a director of other major accommodation providers such as Seefin Events, Airways Centre Limited, Burvea and Gateway Integration. These companies have been involved in the Kippure Estate, Santry and East Wall IPAS centres.
There is also a connection to a company called Edgewell which is wholly owned by another company Bergvon LP Inc which is registered in the Isle of Man. Dwyer is similarly connected to Quanta Capital and Goldstein Properties. Bergvon changed its name to Besga at the end of last year and its off shore status means that we do not actually know who the ultimate owners of these companies are.
We have looked before in closer detail at some of the labyrinthine connections between some of the main players in the accommodation sector. It is something that I intend to return to. For while it is a complex network – and in my opinion deliberately so – it is evident even from a cursory examination of Peppard and its ownership of the IPAS centre in Milford that there is a fairly small and closely connected circle of people at the heart of much of it.
The community in Milford, meanwhile, will have to cope with the significant impact of all of this on local services including schools and doctors and transport which are already under significant pressure. These pressures have been added without any prior consultation or planning with regard to how all of that is proposed to be addressed.