Outside a terraced house on North Circular Road in Dublin, 15 people are waiting in the rain for an estate agent. Huddled in the porch of the house, 66-year-old James Farrell is telling 60-year-old John Prendergast and 50-year-old Louise Hanrahan about the bedsit he and two dozen other people viewed the day before.
“I said to the agent, ‘Any chance you could put a marquee out in the yard for me?’” says Farrell and they laugh.
The estate agent arrives apologising profusely for being late, then brings everyone up to look at two “studio apartments”.
'I don't know where we'll go, we'll have to get a dog box somewhere'
The first, a small bedsit with a bed beside a kitchenette and an en suite bathroom is going for €1,250 a month. The other, a smaller upstairs room with a bed suspended over a couch, like a bunk bed, costs €1,200.
The whole thing lasts about 10 minutes. Fifteen people go in and out of both rooms, give the estate agent their contact details and leave. Outside in the rain, Hanrahan and Prendergast compare notes. “No couch, no chair, if you wanted to watch television you’d have to sit on the bed,” says Hanrahan of the first place.
“They’ve got a neck like a jockey’s bollocks to put them on the market for those prices,” says Prendergast.
Hanrahan and Prendergast have until the end of June to find a new place. They have been living for many years in a council house that was technically in the name of Prendergast’s mother. Prendergast was her carer until she died in 2017. “He thought he was also on the tenancy,” says Hanrahan.
He was not. And now they and all of their stuff (Prendergast has a collection of rock memorabilia) are due to be ousted from one council house, despite being on the waiting list for another. “We’re number 13 on the list,” says Hanrahan. “Unlucky for some.”
Hanrahan lives on an invalidity pension and Prendergast on a disability allowance. “I don’t know where we’ll go,” says Hanrahan. “We’ll have to get a dog box somewhere.”
One family of three, a father, mother and teenager, live all week in different homes before returning to a relative's house at the weekend
Last week The Irish Times put a call out to people who are looking for places to rent to see what sort of experiences they are having. Some of their stories are below. Most responders speak about their fear and anxiety about renting in a country that offers relatively little security of tenure to renters and about the particular difficulty of finding an affordable place to live right now.
People talk about huge queues at viewings. They talk about the preponderance of Airbnb properties, landlords who won’t take housing assistance payments, and estate agents who refuse to talk over the phone. They talk about landlords who suddenly decide to sell, do up their properties or invite a relative to stay, sometimes as a ruse to bring in new tenants at a higher rent. They talk about living in a state of continuous worry.
Some people speak about giving up, retreating to parental houses and commuting for hours every day. One family of three, a father, mother and teenager, live all week in different homes before returning to a relative’s house at the weekend. Some people are considering leaving Ireland entirely, not to look for work, but to look for affordable housing. Some believe they may be homeless by the end of the year.
Darren Dunne, a 40-year-old barber from Crumlin, tells me that he has begun psychologically preparing himself for homelessness. Since returning from travelling in 2015 (a period he documented in a book called In Fields of Nettles: One Irishman’s Musings while Cycling Through Europe), he has lived in four different places and now he has been given notice to leave yet again so the landlady can refurbish his flat.
'You do have those moments where you go, okay, if I have to live in a tent I could go out to Sandymount and hide in the bushes where no one can see me'
It’s not even that his Rathmines flat is particularly ideal, he says. “If I put my two hands out, I can almost touch both walls . . . Altogether it’s one medium-sized bedroom converted into a one-bedroom flat.”
He gets anxious when he looks at the property websites, he says, because he can’t see rents he can afford. He has seen queues of people outside houses nearby. “I never realised security was such an important thing until it went,” he says. “When you’re in work, it makes you on edge and it’s also affecting friendships.”
Moving in with family isn’t an option for him and the few suitable places he can see are too expensive. He will share a property with strangers if necessary, he says, but he has not had good experiences with this. In recent years he has shared one place with someone who tampered with his things and another with a man who regularly came home cut and bruised after fighting on the street.
“I should have known,” he says. “He had a black eye when I moved in.”
He never thought he’d be in this situation. When he was younger, he says, the rents were cheaper and he didn’t have the anxiety about it all that he has now. “You do have those moments where you go, okay, so if I have to live in a tent I could go out to Sandymount and hide in the bushes where no one can see me. Where would I wash? Where would I shower? Where would I cook? All of this stuff goes through your head.”
He can’t believe the terrible standard of some of the accommodation he has seen, the number of homes that are available only through Airbnb and he resents the Government’s insistence that the economy is flourishing.
“People are going out every day and working very hard trying to better themselves, giving all their money to a landlord and they’re looking at their place and it’s a piece of sh*t,” he says.
“They’re thinking, I’m working my ass off and what am I getting out of it? That’s where all this mental illness is coming from. It’s directly related to the fact your home has to be first. That’s where your security comes from ... Soon I have to take my bags from this place and I have nowhere to go.”
Thirty-three-year-old Patrick Keating has given up looking for a house for himself, his wife Eileen, and their six-month-old son. They’ve moved in with his parents in Rathgar and he anticipates being there for some time. Last year, when his wife was pregnant, they were living with a friend in a flat that cost them €1,900 a month. “We were dipping a few hundred into our savings every month,” he says.
The tenancy came to an end when, after just six months, the landlord decided to sell. At that point, a month before their son’s birth, Eileen wasn’t working and the cheapest suitable places cost about €1,500 a month “at a minimum . . . We’d just about swing that but we wouldn’t be saving anything and would be living as cheaply as possible.”
More recently Eileen has started working again as a self-employed physiotherapist. Patrick works for a pharmaceutical company. He hopes that after a couple of years living with his parents and saving, they will be in a position to buy. “We’d rather buy than rent again because moving is hell and I don’t want to do that with my son now that he’s here.”
His generation has experienced one setback after another. When he was leaving college in 2008 the recession kicked in and many of his friends left the country. He stayed to do a PhD and, just as he became employable, the rental crisis kicked in. He knows, he says, that with a family home to go to he’s luckier than many, “but it’s almost like a breakdown of the social contract. I went back to college and got an education. It feels like I should be able to raise a family but I can’t really on my own now.”
People say, 'You're only paying €1,400.' Only €1,400! I've added it up. I reckon I've spent €100,000 on renting since 2010
Fifty-seven-year-old Janette Byrne and 60-year-old Nigel Clark are willing to pay a year’s rent in advance to secure a property. But they can’t even get an estate agent on the phone to make that offer.
“They just want your information by email,” says Byrne. “[They say] ‘do not phone us’.” Byrne has even considered calling to some of the many Airbnb properties in the neighbourhood and making the offer directly.
As it stands, they’re due to leave the soon-to-be-sold Glasnevin house they rent in June and they simply can’t find anywhere they can afford. “Every morning when we wake up, the worry is there,” she says. “There have been tears some mornings.”
Clark is a touring jazz musician originally from Glasgow and Byrne recently set up a training business after years as a senior manager for a charity. Though their income isn’t large, they have always been prompt rent payers and Byrne has €30,000 in savings left over from the sale of a house when she separated from her husband in 2010.
Having this money makes them ineligible for any Government assistance and because Byrne has had cancer twice and they’re both older and self-employed, getting a mortgage is not an option. So they find themselves queuing up with people of all ages to see the few barely affordable properties that are available. “I went to a viewing yesterday at 6.15,” says Clark. “I arrived at six and there were already 25 people on the steps. That was going for €1,600.”
“People have sheds let out,” says Byrne. “There are one rooms. There are cabins. Everything is going on in this neighbourhood . . . [The listings] often have one picture of a tree outside the door or a table. They don’t even care about presenting the property well.”
The one time they got any enthusiastic engagement from an estate agent they realised afterwards that the property was going for €1,350 a week, not a month. “People say, ‘You’re only paying €1,400’,” says Byrne. “Only €1,400! I’ve added it up. I reckon I’ve spent €100,000 on renting since 2010.”
The crisis has affected their extended family. Byrne’s siblings have children and grandchildren living with them. Another family member couch surfs. Her son lives in New Zealand with his family. “He actually said to me, ‘I don’t want to be in the same situation you’re in. I want a home by the time I’m 40 and this is the only way I can see of doing that.’”
They’ve considered many options. They looked into building a cabin in Byrne’s parents’ garden but this possibility was ruled out by a recent council vote against such developments. They’ve considered relocating to another county or even country. Byrne doesn’t want to have to do this as she wants to be near her elderly parents and, furthermore, as someone who has had cancer she’s reluctant to move far from the hospital where she was treated. “Any cancer patient will tell you there’s a safety being near the hospital you had all your care in.”
Their worst-case-scenario involves each of them moving back with their parents individually – Byrne in Dublin and Clark in Glasgow. “It makes us very sad to think of that,” she says.
She recalls that when she was growing up in Finglas everyone she knew rented and it was seen as a norm that if people couldn’t afford a home, affordable homes would be provided.
“You kind of think that when you’re a grandparent, you’ll have a home your grandchildren can come to,” says Byrne. “Every time you move you have to leave stuff that you love and are attached to and those are your memories and your life. You keep losing bits of yourself.”
I'm sick and I can't work and I've done nothing wrong. But I could end up homeless
Fifty-one-year-old Mary Elizabeth Murphy has lived in a bedsit in Ballsbridge paying below-market rates for nine years. Now her elderly landlords are divesting themselves of their properties in order to retire and she has been told she may need to find a new place by the end of the year.
Murphy is a part-qualified accountant who is currently living on an invalidity pension due to a chronic illness. She walks on Sandymount Strand, talks to people on Facebook groups and plays online Scrabble and chess but she needs to spend a lot of her time resting. “The first half of my day is written off by illness,” she says.
She is very worried about her future. Everyone in the building is similarly worried, she says, as many of them are older or unwell or on a low income. “When I was working, I paid what I had to pay. Rent went up and down. But I don’t have the option to pay any more now . . . Now there isn’t anything to find either sharing or on my own . . . Landlords cherry-pick the best tenants, not someone on social welfare.”
She went back to do an accounting degree in her 30s purely to put herself in a position to buy a house before she got too old to get a mortgage. It was while doing her degree that she first became unwell, she says “but I had no idea I’d have to stop work at 42. I thought I’d be in a better situation by now.”
She has been on a housing list since 2008 but she thinks it’s very unlikely something will come up before the year ends. Before Christmas she was terrified about losing her place but since then she made New Year’s resolutions to be more constructive. “I’m saving. I’m selling stuff on Ebay, getting money together as much as I can. I’ll stay in a guest house if I have to, for a while, if one can be got.”
Despite the situation she’s in, Murphy hasn’t a bad word to say about her landlords. “They’re great on repairs and maintenance and they kept the rent low and kept the place really well. They’re 75. They’re ill and want to retire. They’ve done nothing wrong. And I’m sick and I can’t work and I’ve done nothing wrong. But I could end up homeless.”
It's enough to make you cry. We could just take all this stuff and drive to Spain. But at this stage of life you want to have roots somewhere. One more move is about it for me
Sixty-six-year-old James Myles Farrell, who I meet at the viewing on the North Circular Road, invites me in to the well-kept Smithfield flat he shares with his Spanish wife, Maria. A blues musician and a professional carpenter, they have a sitting room filled with guitars and some of the furniture he has made. “I’m not moving with two suitcases,” he says.
Since moving to Dublin from Galway in 2002, he and Maria have lived in eight different places. They like their current landlady but they’ve been told they must leave in a few months so that one of her relatives can move in. Rents have crept up over the years. They currently pay €1,400 (“That’s my top whack”) and a few years ago they were in a bigger flat nearby paying only €900. Now the going rate in the area, he says, is about €1,800. “Landlords,” he says, “are taking the piss.”
He and Maria are not in a position to pay more money. Farrell is retired. A few years ago, severe arthritis made carpentry impossible for him. He worked as an extra on TV shows like Fair City and Vikings but more recently a badly broken arm meant he had to stop doing that.
He has moved around a lot in his life, he says, from the UK to Germany to Limerick. He met Maria when they both lived in Majorca and he shows me a picture of the huge farmhouse in which he lived while he worked there. He has owned property in the past. He built the house in the UK where his children from a former relationship were reared.
He is on a local authority housing list for senior citizens but he’s been told that it could be at least two years before something becomes available. There certainly won’t be anything for them by the time he has to leave in the summer. After seeing the state of some of the places available to rent in recent days, he rang Maria and said, “It’s enough to make you cry.”
He knows a lot of homeless people from when he used to go busking and he can’t believe the Government has allowed things to get so bad. He’s thinking that he might use €1,400 worth of rent money to buy a van instead of getting a new place. “We could just take all this stuff and drive to Spain.”
It’s not an ideal solution. Being “migratory” never bothered him when he was younger, he says, “But at this stage of life, you want to have roots somewhere . . . One more move is about it for me.”
