Blake O’Donnell, whose family was the focus of the infamous Gorse Hill property saga, is running for the Conservative Party in Thursday’s local elections in the UK.

The Tory solicitor, who has lived in Croydon since 2015, is standing for a council seat in the unremarkable London suburb of Norbury Park, whose two seats have been held by Labour for the last four years.

Mr O’Donnell came third in the election of 2018, garnering 17pc of the vote in the newly formed, ethnically diverse constituency.

His bio page on the Croydon Conservatives website highlights his legal experience in finance and insolvency, as well as his background in entrepreneurship, which the party said would help him “to manage taxpayers’ money wisely”.

Mr O’Donnell was a central figure in the battle over Gorse Hill, the multimillion-euro clifftop mansion on Dublin’s Killiney Hill that was seized by Bank of Ireland as part of a bankruptcy battle in 2015 with property developer Brian O’Donnell and his wife Mary Patricia, Blake’s parents.

Blake O’Donnell represented the family interests at the Four Courts in the lengthy and acrimonious case which saw the bank try to enforce a 2011 €71.5m bankruptcy judgment in part by repossessing the family home.

In a gambit to hold on to the property, the O’Donnells entrusted the luxury house to the four children, including Blake, but the Supreme Court ordered them to vacate.

When the parents returned to Killiney to assert their “right to residency” they barricaded themselves in the house while members of the New Land League, led by Jerry Beades, protested outside.

Bank of Ireland’s legal representative at the time scoffed that the O’Donnells were members of “the landlord class”. 

The spectacle of populist protesters descending on Dublin’s millionaire’s row – home to celebrities such as Bono, Van Morrison and Enya – attracted media attention for several weeks.

The family played up the repossession angle at a time when thousands of ordinary mortgage holders were struggling under long-term debt arrears accumulated during the Celtic Tiger, urging them to disrupt the Bank of Ireland AGM with their pleas.

The case rumbled on through dozens of court hearings over five years before the family’s final appeal was denied in 2016, allowing the bank to put the house on the market for €8.5m.