“Absolutely dreading it,” says Erica Robb, about the prospect of moving into a mobile home with her husband Dave and their six-year-old daughter, Georgia, while their Donegal house is demolished and a new one built.
“At the same time, I want to move in, and get started, and move on. It is nice to know that we are not sitting in limbo any more and that we can get on with our lives.”
The improved terms introduced last year to support people whose homes are crumbling because they were built using defective blocks is leading to an uptick in the numbers using the publicly-financed scheme, according to people in Donegal. The scheme includes a €15,000 grant to help people pay for temporary accommodation while their homes are being rebuilt or repaired.
However, on the Inishowen peninsula, the area of the State most affected by the defective block crisis, the shortage of housing means many families are having to move into mobile homes, or stay with relatives, while their homes are being fixed.
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The Robbs, who live in Quigley’s Point, between Muff and Moville, bought a second-hand mobile home which they have moved on to the site of their detached home and connected to the services.
“We inquired about a few houses around us, but the rent was more than €1,000 a month, and we figured, well the mobile home is €3,300, instead of [rent of] €12,000.”
The house that is to be demolished was built in 2007 but unfinished at the time of the property crash. They bought it in 2014, paid to have it finished and moved in.
“At the time it had some cracks and the engineers put it down to settling cracks, but we watched the cracks grow and grow and grow, and we had our suspicions. We waited for a scheme to come along and then we had it tested, and of course it has very high levels.”
The house will be demolished in September and it is likely to be more than a year before the new one will be completed. The revised scheme to help people like the Robbs has a €420,000 cap – with the €15,000 temporary accommodation grant included in the cap. The demolition and rebuild is likely to cost the Robbs about €460,000.
Paddy Diver, who lives in Carndonagh with his wife and three children, moved a mobile home and a caravan on to the site about six months ago, when the time came to demolish and rebuild their family home.
“I couldn’t find accommodation locally,” he says. “The biggest mobile we could find was a three-bed and that wasn’t big enough, so we had to get another wee caravan beside that, a wee small rocky thing, a Fr Ted caravan.”
His oldest child, Mark, who is 25 and working, moved into the caravan, but it proved so unsuitable they instead did some work on a shed on the site and Mark moved in there.
“It’s not easy, to be honest,” says Paddy. “But there is no rental accommodation here in Donegal. It was bad enough before, but now with the immigration crisis and the mica crisis, finding a house is like a needle in a haystack.”
Like the Robbs, he has opted for a timber-framed house. “I have no faith in the blocks in Donegal, or rural Ireland, no faith at all.” The cost of the rebuild will exceed the cap but, he says, he is not sure yet by how much. “I’ve saved my doors, my stairs, but it depends. I won’t know until we get into the nitty gritty.”
Joy Beard, from Buncrana, who was elected as an independent councillor in the most recent local elections as a member of the 100% Redress Party, is living in a mobile home with her husband on the site of their former home, which has been demolished. A new one is being built using funds from the Government scheme.
The couple bought the house new in 2007, and it was knocked down about a month ago. They hope the new house will be ready within a year.
“We have two crises here,” she says. “We have the housing crisis and we have the defective block crisis. Obviously, we have the refugee and immigration issue as well as everywhere, but we are in a unique situation here in Inishowen. A lot of people are simply not applying for the scheme because they have nowhere to go.”
Only people who have a site around their home can opt to use a mobile home, she says. “It is no use to you if you are in a housing estate, and we have complete housing estates that need to be demolished.”
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Dara Furey, of Sean Furey Estate Agents, Buncrana, says a lot of people are moving in with parents and grandparents because of the housing crisis. “There is a grant of €15,000 for rental, but it is no good if you have nowhere to go.”
Rents are increasing as are the prices of mobile homes, he says. “Everything is money.” Rents are about €1,200 for a three-bed house, but there are “no residential properties to rent”. Letting agents have long waiting lists of people looking for rental properties.
There is a chronic need for more social housing, he says.
As far as he is aware, only six homes were privately developed and put up for sale on the peninsula in the past four years. “There is no private building. The cost of building a house is more than the builder can sell it for. We have problems coming at us from all sides.”
Cllr Michael McDermott of Fianna Fáil, chair of the Donegal County Council’s defective blocks committee, says there is a lot more happening since the Government announced an improved support scheme in June last year.
“People are taking up the scheme. At the minute there are in and about 2,500 applications [in Donegal], there are about 220 or 230 on site at the minute, but in the context of what has to be done it is still very small numbers versus the amount of houses that have to be fixed.”
He believes 6,000-10,000 houses need to be demolished or fixed. “It is only the start of the race but, to be fair, the scheme has come a long way.”
The original scheme opened for applications in June 2020, involved a cap of €247,000 and would cover only 90 per cent of the cost, whereas the new scheme involves a cap of €420,000 and can cover the entire cost, though with a lower cap for smaller homes. The scheme involves five options, depending on the assessment of the building, from complete demolition to replacing external walls to various extents. People who applied under the old scheme can access the new cap level so they are not disadvantaged.
According to the Department of Housing, 502 applications in Donegal have been approved for complete demolition under both schemes, with 156 of these under the scheme announced last year. Smaller numbers of applications have been approved under the other options, with 712 approved in all categories, of which 239 are under the new scheme. Seventy-seven homeowners have been reimbursed under the alternative accommodation grant element of the scheme.
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