He seemed a harmless sort. Middle-aged, kept himself well, from the country and unmarried. One of life's natural bachelors, I thought and let him have the ground floor of a house I was renovating. Nothing had been done with it for about 30 years, but it seemed to suit him.

He did not complain about the damp wallpaper and the primitive lavatory out the back. I had not intended letting the place until the work was done, and then only to young professionals.

But he came in the open door while I was with the builders and engaged me in conversation and something from my own past responded. (Fatal - I later realised he reminded me of an uncle who came home from Australia to die, a mysterious figure of my childhood).

It suited me to have someone staying while the builders were working upstairs. Everytime I visited he seemed Happy as Larry, talking in an erudite way about anything and everything.

He smoked a pipe, exhaling Shavian pondering - "Trouble with the world today is - people is travelling all over the place; if they stayed at home, we'd all live in peace . . ." Jet planes and computers, he reckoned, were the cause of most of our ills.

He had gathered a few objects about himself, bits of radios and furniture. He fashioned a makeshift table from a discarded door and made a display unit from planks and a medley of bricks.

Romantically, I saw him as a bit of an Ancient Mariner, more at home with the flotsam of the past, living out of builders' skips. He insisted on paying the rent. Somebody should have warned me . . .

Months later, with the upstairs renovated, I suggested he move up, so I could renovate downstairs. He wouldn't hear of it, explaining that he was perfectly happy on the ground floor.

Hadn't he the garden to lie out in and the birds and the trees to talk to in the morning?

Why, man, he would be daft to change. He had found a good home - and wasn't I the best landlord he had ever met, barring the woman who kept the digs in Drumcondra in 1960.

There used to be a great crowd of young fellas in the house then, but most of them went off to get married and he wouldn't know any of them now. He shook his head at the stupidity of young men going off to be married, what was the sense of it? Where was the freedom in that, man?

As the months went by and he refused to budge, my enthusiasm for him waned. I no longer delighted in his pithy views on Civilisation or What Was Wrong with The Human Race . . . I was more concerned at what went wrong with my judgement.

I realised he had opted out of ordinary living. I saw him sometimes in other parts of the city, peering into skips, or bringing home stuff in plastic bags on the handlebars of his bike.

I used to groan out loud, knowing where the discarded detritus of our age would end up - in what I was hoping to advertise as a "desirable garden flat close to all amenities".

Let's not mince words here. He was making a rubbish dump of my property. First the livingroom, then the kitchen, eventually the back garden became piled high with stuff - from bakelite radios to bits of bikes and old washing machines and lawnmowers.

You name it, he had it. He seemed to be on a mission to reclaim the unclaimable.

But not at my expense. Climbing over mounds of stuff to where he lay in his bed, smoking his pipe, I gave him notice to quit, saying I had no chance of letting the upstairs apartment, with his municipal dump downstairs. He replied he would consult his lawyer.

There followed months of correspondence, written by himself, exploring various sections of the Landlord and Tenant Act.

I got him out eventually, by taking no rent for months, having a skip outside when he was on his rounds and filling it to the brim. It took two skip loads, changed locks and doors and windows boarded up to get him to see the light of departure . . .

I am not a psychiatrist. I am only a landlord.