He left the house apparently unattended for 8 years on an island of 120 people... not really surprising that someone would burn it down because they didn't like the sight of it.
Edit: he was contacted but it wasn't particularly honest :)
Did they mention anything about this one way or the other? Maybe they didn't know who the owner was or how to get a hold of him? Or maybe they did try to contact but didn't get a response? Unless I missed some part of the passage.
> The reason Neville had returned to the island in the first place was a letter from the local council warning this house had been damaged by a storm, but an engineer’s report found that the house was most likely brought down by mechanical means.
So he was contacted, by the local council, and they lied to him.
Sounds to me like the island as a whole decided he wasn't going to come live in his house anymore and it was in the way, but they had to keep that secret of course.
There's a high chance both are true. 8 years left untended on a very weather-exposed coast - I'm a little further down the same coast, and I can only imagine the state it'd be in.
I don't want this to sound like victim-blaming, but perhaps trying to imagine how things would progress to a point where anyone thought demolishing it was the right thing to do. Imagine getting your neighbours car towed off their own property simply because you don't like it - I think that's what most of us are picturing. Now imagine it's a rusting shell sat on four rotting, flat tyres. Perhaps burnt out, perhaps a few windows missing, perhaps bits of roof missing - we do get the odd hurricane. This is not an unrealistic picture of a house that's been left to weather the full fury of the Atlantic for 8 years. All it takes is to lose a bit of roof or a bit of glass, and the damage will snowball quickly.
I'm not saying the owner deserved it. But there's a good possibility the house itself deserved it. And part of the self-reliance of isolated islands is that the community as a whole tends to take care of what needs to be done. I dare say if he'd been resident they would have banded together to help with repairs - that tight-knit community goes both ways.
Based on being the only hotel on the island, this[0] appears to be the hotel in question. I read the space the house was in was being used as parking for the hotel, and the buildings either side of it don't look new - so I'm assuming the space is the turn-around between the hotel and the shore. You can see[1] it's a very prominent place in 'town' to be left dilapidated. Again, not trying to excuse anyone, but just trying to wrap my head around their motivations.
[0] https://www.derryjournal.com/business/pictures-one-most-remo...