What Happened To Tathony House After Mass Eviction Battle?

We fought a tough eighteen month battle to prevent our whole block of flats at Tathony House Dublin 8 being mass evicted. We managed to make sure not one of our neighbours went homeless and we were still in our homes over a year after the original eviction date.

Tathony House was sold by the original owner, posh Blackrock landlord Ronan McDonnell. He wanted out and showed many buyers around the old building. He had no plan other than to escape with a bag of cash.

He wanted tenants out because he wanted to sell an empty building to the highest bidder. In the end, McDonnell got €5.65 million for a kip of a building that began its life as a malt storehouse for Roe’s Distillery in the mid-1800s.

Now the building is emergency accommodation for homeless men run by a company called Inishmot Limited, a front for a huge capitalist fund called The Coldec Group.

The Coldec Group is a multi-million euro fund that owns dozens of properties including Hatch Hall in Dublin, a property on Westmoreland Street with planning permission for a hotel and Celbridge Manor homeless accommodation.

They also run Ryevale House, Firmount Demesne and Honeywood House. They’re making a fortune from homelessness and from IPAS.

Coldec has the backing of an Austrian bank and secretive US funds and this institutional backing has allowed a network of shell companies set up by Coldec to get their hands on dozens of prime properties which they use to milk the state for millions.

According to public tracking data on StateSpend Ireland, Inishmot Limited has been paid a total of €4.6 million by Irish public bodies since its incorporation in 2024.

Dublin City Council’s public accounts show Inishmot Ltd put in a purchase order for €494,332 in the quarter up to June 2026. In March 2026 they had recorded three purchase orders for that quarter, one for €506,080, one for €443,040 and another for €434,720.

In two years Inishmot have almost made the cost of buying Tathony House back. Obviously, they had to pay for refurbishing the old building. But it won’t take them long to get that outlay back and be in profit at the taxpayer’s expense.

If they keep Tathony House for a few years they’ll make back their initial investment many times over and then when they’re done they’ll sell the Dublin 8 building for millions.

Inishmot Ltd used Beacon Company Secretaries which is an Irish company that provides you with a name as “director” of your company so you can set up a front, even though they’re not the actual directors.

Coldec used this method to set up loads of fronts which it uses to capture state cash.

Between 2022 and early 2026, the network of companies tied to The Coldec Group pulled in over €176 million in state payments. In Dublin’s emergency housing, Coldec is the largest recipient of homeless accommodation funding.

Coldec are very secretive but one name that popped up frequently was Ronan Holbrook. In 2024 and 2025, Holbrook did what seemed like a corporate reshuffle, resigning from more than two dozen shell companies.

But Holbrook was a painter and decorator who didn’t have the cash to be buying properties all over Ireland. He was a front man for others. A local barber and hair restoration clinic operator named Patrick Ward was also installed as a director across ten corporate fronts in the Coldec web.

In 2023, Holbrook’s company, Me Libérer, converted Ryevale House in Kildare into an IPAS centre housing a hundred women. Kildare County Council ruled the development unauthorised but the state continued to pay him €7.5 million in public cash.

While people like painter Ronan Holbrook served as front-facing names on individual property shells, rich Irish man Ronan Mallon is the real mastermind behind Coldec.

Mallon is a former bank credit analyst for aircraft leasing firms who took over Coldec Properties in 2019. Before Mallon, the company got its hands on small houses and B&Bs in Kildare to rent them out to construction workers building an Intel facility in Leixlip.

When the Ukraine war hit Mallon saw an opportunity to make a fortune buying up old buildings and getting hand outs from the state for both homeless and Ukrainian refugee accommodation.

Mallon bought the Celbridge Manor Hotel in Kildare and his networks then went on a buying spree, acquiring everything from the Kilkenny Inn to Harry’s Hotel in Kinnegad (via a front called Sicuro Holdings, where Mallon was the sole director).

Mallon was also the director of the company that purchased the Shipwright Pub in Ringsend, Dublin. He later resigned as director and handed it over to painter and decorator Holbrook!

The Shipwright was to be used to house sixteen homeless families but after it was attacked Mallon became more careful about putting his name on paper as director of any Coldec front.

Between Holbrook and Mallon, they were listed as directors of more than fifty different front companies.

Another front of Mallon’s called Coolebridge Limited was the shell company used to complete the purchase of Tathony House from the previous landlord, Ronan McDonnell.

In March 2025, Coolebridge Limited submitted a planning query to Dublin City Council to verify whether converting Tathony House into emergency homeless accommodation needed planning permission. Then they set up another front, Inishmot Ltd, to run the place.

Mallon was able to convince an Austrian bank and US investors that his strategy of buying up old buildings and getting hand outs from the state was hugely profitable. That’s how Coldec expanded its empire.

We left Tathony House in July 2024. We were lucky to have had many years on the housing list and were eventually housed by the council. We were the last tenants to leave Tathony House, making sure everyone else was safe before we left.

A private fund like Coldec did not spend nearly €6 million on a building and set up new shell companies in March 2024, without having had a guaranteed commitment from the council that the contract was theirs the moment the building was cleared of tenants.

We were happy to be the last to leave having made sure all our neighbours were safe. But was the council happy to see us housed because it got things moving for the parasites in Coldec? By housing us DCC delivered Tathony House to the fund.

Outsourcing and privatisation have been the mantra since the time of Maggie Thatcher. It’s now called neoliberalism. The state throws millions at private operators instead of using buildings it already owns to house the homeless. IPAS has also become a scam operation for capitalist profiteers.

The same goes on in the health service, in the HSE and all across the state. Private capitalists put their hands out for state cash. They get whatever they want from the state and when they don’t they just buy up politicians like billionaire Denis O’Brien did.

The Tathony House story shows that by fighting an eviction you can stay in your home for a long time and prevent tenants from facing homelessness. But it also shows that as long as the state is puppeteered by capitalists they will use the local councils and the state to facilitate an orgy of profiteering at workers’ expense.

We need a working class rebellion in this country to put workers in the driving seat. Then no Austrian bank or US investor can ever again work hand in hand with some local parasite capitalist to profit at our expense.