Tenants of a Dublin 8 apartment block who are facing mass eviction will hold a rally outside the Dáil this Wednesday in hopes the Government and Dublin City Council will intervene and keep them in their homes.
Residents of Tathony House fear they could end up in emergency accommodation if the eviction plan is carried out due to the dire state of the rental market in the capital. They will be joined by tenants who are also facing mass eviction from apartments in Rathmines and St Helens in Dun Laoghaire.
Cllr Madeleine Johansson is one of the people living in Tathony House, Kilmainham, who received an eviction note last month. “I spend a lot of time each day helping constituents with housing problems,” the South Dublin County councillor told Dublin Live. “But now I'm facing eviction just like the worried tenants who come to me in my job.”
Cllr Johansson has been living in Tathony House with her husband since 2009. They received their eviction notice on 20 October and they’re due to move out on 2 June 2023. Both of these dates fall outside the timeframe for the eviction ban that was introduced by the Government a few weeks ago.
There is legislation in place that is supposed to stop these type of mass evictions, she said. However there are exemptions and their landlord is using them, saying he would be making 20 per cent less than the market price if he sold the property with the tenants in it and this would cause him undue hardship.
Ms Johansson will be joining the rally on Wednesday. The tenants are also going to take a case to the Residential Tenancy Board to dispute the cause for eviction.
James O’Toole is another Tathony House resident who will be joining the rally. The landlord handed him the notice in the corridor.
“You just kind of take it," he said. "You just walk away, you go into your flat and then you open up the document and start reading it and then the shock kind of hit me then.
“And then you go on daft.ie or the rental website and you start going, ‘Jesus, is there anywhere else where I can live?’ And you see a single room, like a bed in Kimmage for €1,800 or a bed in Portobello for €1,600.
“And then the stress starts to kick in. Then you really get worried because you're thinking ‘there's nowhere I can afford’. I'm probably going to have to move way out beyond the M50 before I could find something that I can afford.
“So I'm going to have to leave this area, which I grew up in – in Dublin 8 – and then, you're thinking, well, if I move out beyond the M50, my rent could be cheaper. But how do I travel to work?”
Mr O’Toole works near Croke Park as a community worker. He added: “So then you start getting really, really stressed out. And then the first night, you can't sleep because you don't know where you're going to be in the new year. You're just stressed out.”
Knowing he was going to lose the roof over his head has turned his life upside down, James said. He has lived in the area his entire life, and has come to regard his apartment there as his home after 13 years of living there.
He continued: “I really like this area, but with gentrification and aparthotels and expenses, student accommodation and all that kind of stuff, you really feel that workers can't afford to live in Dublin anymore.”
Residents with children are under additional stress. “One of the women in the block that lives downstairs, she’s a lone parent who works in James' Hospital," said James. "She has a four-year-old child that she drops to a crèche in the area.”
Now the single mother is saying there's no way she can afford to find something else in the neighbourhood. “There has to be something wrong with a city where the people who work in your hospitals can't afford to live near the hospital,” Mr O’Toole said.
The situation is even worse for parents with multiple children since properties with multiple bedrooms are even more expensive. One of the Tathony House residents was a Brazilian with a family of five who already left because the stress was too much for the family. They couldn’t find anything affordable in Dublin and had to move to Dundalk to find a home that would fit their family.
The tenants will have a meeting with Council management on Thursday, after the Wednesday rally. Both Cllr Johansson and Mr O’Toole are hopeful for the outcome and believe there’s a real possibility of the Council or possibly an approved housing body stepping in to buy the property.
“I think that is a possibility because the housing crisis is so bad and obviously the Government as well isn't meeting their targets,” Cllr Johansson said. “So this would be a very easy way to both add to their numbers, but also then save all the households in this building from eviction.
“The state should step in in these circumstances and make sure there’s funding available for the councils to buy properties like these,” she said. This has been done before, she said, but it has been mainly in cases concerning individual properties, where the tenant is on the housing list and the landlord gives them an eviction notice because they’re selling the property.
Additionally, there are a number of funding options available that could fix the issue. “The solutions are there, the options are there, the money's there,” Mr O’Toole said. “The Government has provided a fund to buy properties. So the only barrier really is just Dublin City Council needs to get the green light for an approved housing body to step in.”
Tathony House residents are going to continue their demonstrations until they have certainty from the Government or the council about their fate.
“If you evict 35 households you're basically just adding to the housing crisis in this area,” Mr O’Toole added. “You're adding a hundred people to the queues for apartments and you're just making the thing much worse.”
Dublin Live has contacted Tathony Holdings for comment.
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