Lisa Brady and her sons – aged 11, seven and four – face homelessness in just over three weeks. The apartment she has rented for more than nine years, in Cherry Orchard, Dublin, is needed by her landlord for his family.
She was given the legally required 224 days’ notice to quit in April last year. The family would have been due to leave in December but the eviction moratorium saved them from homelessness over Christmas.
Approved for the housing assistance payment (HAP), she can pay up to €1,950 per month for a two- or three-bedroom home and has been “constantly” responding to ads for homes to rent over the past 10 months.
“I am emailing and emailing, applying for two-beds and three-beds and hearing nothing back. An apartment right above me is going for rent since Friday. I emailed twice over the weekend and then I seen the agent there yesterday and I went and spoke to him. He said to me: ‘Yeah, well look the landlord is in talks to a landlord from another apartment, because the ceiling collapsed in on the family he has.’ So you are even applying for places but they have other people ready to go into them.”
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She had been following speculation about the eviction ban over recent weeks, and “sort of knew it wouldn’t be extended”. Nonetheless, she is “in shock”.
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“I actually can’t believe it. I am here nearly 10 years. I literally brought my children home from hospital to here. This is the only home they ever had. I am trying to prepare them, my oldest especially. Sometimes I don’t realise, I’d be talking to my friends and they overhear. The other week my oldest came out to me and he asked: ‘Mam, are we going to have a home? Will we find somewhere to live?’ I said: ‘Yes, don’t be worrying. We’ll have a new home’. Obviously I can’t tell him how bad the situation is. It is horrible.”
Asked whom she blames for the crisis she is facing, she says: “This Government. I don’t blame the landlords. I understand that landlords need their properties back but it is so wrong that there is no plan, no care for the families and children who are going to be homeless.
“We are classed as statistics. We are not classed as human beings living through this. The people making these decisions don’t have to deal with this reality. They go home to their homes, nice and secure, and they don’t have this worry. They don’t actually understand what it is to live through this. It makes me so angry at them.”
On the Daft.ie website on Tuesday there were 24 two-bed and three three-bed properties across Dublin city and county, available within the €1,950 per month that Lisa may pay.
However, she said, “I went for a viewing for a house in Clondalkin but they’d over 1,000 inquiries for it. It is a losing battle. My family are all cramped themselves. They can’t take us in, so that’s not a solution for me.”
Helen, a cleaner from Cork, plans to live in her car after she is evicted from her home next month. As she sees it, without the protection of the eviction ban, she has no other choice.
The woman, in her early 60s, received a notice of termination from her landlady who is selling up because she claims she cannot afford the estimated €30,000 required to refurbish the two-bedroom apartment where damp and mould make the bedrooms uninhabitable for Helen (who did not wish to give her full name).
She sleeps in the living room where there is heat from the oven, dryer or kettle.
Her rent is about €800 a month, of which she pays €550 herself with the remainder covered by the HAP, the Government’s social housing support for people who have a long-term housing need. Helen has lived in her apartment for 14 years.
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The separated mother of four and a grandmother lives alone. She looked for alternative accommodation but cannot afford the €1,300-€1,400 monthly rent for one-bedroom apartments currently being advertised in the city at a time of housing shortages and soaring rents.
“It is a disgrace. What are people going to do? I am not the only one living in a car. I start work at 10 to five in the mornings and I see many people sleeping in cars on the way to work,” she said.
“It could happen to anybody. They say that if you are working, you have enough money to rent, but I don’t. I know a few people where I work and there would be one or two of them that are homeless. I don’t know where they live or where they stay.”
Helen has breathing difficulties – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma – which she believes stems from the damp and mould at home.
She has gone through “a bad marriage” and doesn’t want to bother her children in her search for a place to live as they have their own difficulties, she said.
After she is evicted, she plans to park outside the premises she cleans in an industrial estate but she is not sure yet what’s in store for her when her Ford Focus will become her new home.
“I don’t know until I get in there. I don’t want to go to my family. When they find out I will be in a car, I am sure they will say: ‘Come with us.’ But I don’t want to really,” she said. “I want to keep my own independence.”
