What Happened to Teach Presho?
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
The Tory Island home of Neville Presho, marked on either side of building with an x, in 1976 before it was demolished.
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Imagine boarding up your holiday home on a remote island off the Irish coast and heading off to New Zealand only to return eight years later to find an empty space.
That’s exactly what happened to engineer-turned documentary maker, Neville Presho, who is currently in the Irish courts fighting for compensation.
The island in question is Tory off Donegal’s north west coast.
Presho first visited it in 1976 and like many before him and since was beguiled by its remote beauty. A few years later he purchased a six bedroomed two storey house on the edge of the Atlantic and used it as a holiday home for his frequent visits over subsequent years.
Presho had big ideas, big ambitions, big aspirations for his new island home and its Gaeltacht people. He wanted to help but he was a man who jumped from one idea to the next and soon New Zealand beckoned.
In his absence, his house was first squatted in by visiting trades-people and later mysteriously burned, finally falling down, and vanishing, stone by stone without a trace. In its place was what looked like a car park and the septic tank for the new hotel directly across the road.
When gardai investigated no one knew anything, not even the island king, Patsy Dan Rodgers, who personally welcomes all visitors to the island.
Hotelier, Pat Doohan maintains the house burned down as a result of dodgy wiring and the weather finished it off.
Presho, suffering from bi-polar disorder, diagnosed for the first time after his house disappeared, believes it was malicious and prays for the wrong doers. His life lies in tatters. Marriage over, he is estranged from his children and his home.
Constrained by the statute of limitation, he may not get the justice he so desperately craves. A High Court judge will deliver his ruling at the end of the month.