Niall Collins’s marriage certificate shows he didn’t live in his parents’ house – like he claimed

Niall Collins’s marriage certificate confirms he hadn’t lived in his parents’ home his whole life – like he claimed in his 2001 planning application.

The Limerick County TD is to address the Dáil this evening and give a statement on the application, having claimed throughout the week that he “acted correctly” in submitting it.

In the application Collins was asked for his address, which he gave as “Red House Hill, Patrickswell, Co. Limerick”. This is the Cloughkeating address of his parents’ family home. He went on to say he’d lived there for 30 years till the time of his application. The application further claimed that Collins wanted “to build his own family home and move out of his parents’ house.”

Junior minister Collins however already owned a home on Father Russell Road, Dooradoyle, which he’d bought in 1999, according to Land Registry records. Collins has this week refused to address this falsehood in his application.

When asked by the Limerick Post about the property he already owned and why he’d given his parents’ address as his own, Collins ignored the question and instead insisted that “Niall Collins is on all the documents, OK.”

The Ditch has viewed Collins’s marriage certificate and it confirms he had lived at an address other than the one listed in his application.

The document, from 2000, asked Collins and his partner to list the address at which they planned to live.

The couple listed their “Fr Russell Road, Limerick” address – not “Red House Hill, Patrickswell, Co. Limerick”, the address Collins gave in his planning application a year later.

The document confirms that Collins was living at the Father Russell Road, Dooradoyle property that he failed to declare in the controversial application.

Collins declined to comment ahead of his Dáil address.