Ann Moore spent six hours up a ladder in protest at her family’s eviction from their Dublin home. But in an area where hundreds are in rent arrears there’s little sympathy for a family that doesn’t pay
A FOLK MEMORY of eviction by colonial landlords gave powerful resonance to the picture of Ann Moore, an evicted council tenant, standing on a ladder for six hours as she tried to gain access to her bedroom.
On the street outside, her stunned husband and children stood in their pyjamas, having been roused from bed in their council house in Loughlinstown, Co Dublin, by gardaí and council officials.
Moore was nearing the end of a 12-hour shift as a part-time care worker when, at 7am on Friday, May 14th, the eviction crew arrived. Everyone in the family – Ann, her husband Christy and three children, aged 24, 22 and 17 – says the eviction came as a complete shock. Moore arrived home at 8.15am. After being told she couldn’t go back in for her belongings, panic drove her up a ladder to try to get in through her bedroom window for her asthma medication. When she heard someone jeer from the crowd she spontaneously decided to stay up the ladder in protest.
The Moores and their local councillor, Richard Boyd Barrett of People Before Profit, say the family are victims of a heartless system, and the Moores believe they were “set up as an example” to frighten other residents in arrears. Dún Laoghaire- Rathdown County Council says any eviction is a last resort. The local TD and Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore says that in a situation such as this every attempt is made over a number of years to help a family deal with it.
While some neighbours express concern for the Moores and praise Ann’s pride in her home, not all of their neighbours are sympathetic. “You don’t just wake up and be evicted. Everyone finds it hard to pay the rent, lone parents especially. That’s life. You have to find the money. I wouldn’t have a lot of sympathy,” says Mary McHugh, another resident in Loughlinstown’s Gleanntan Estate, who trained as estate manager on a community employment scheme.
Rent arrears are so common in the area that juggling rent and other bills is a way of life. A fifth of the council’s tenants – that’s 800 families – are in arrears at any one time, But since 2004 only six families have been evicted due to rent arrears, including the Moores.
On the Gleanntan Estate, where the Moores lived in a well-kept council house, many of their neighbours have also struggled to pay council rent while living on low wages or unemployment benefit.
The Moores were charged €100 per week for the house, where Ann, Christy, their two adult sons and their 17-year-old daughter lived. This rate was means-tested and took into account Ann’s part-time job and Christy and their two sons’ occasional work. The low rent, combined with substantial allowances from the council and social welfare, means, according to some of the Moores’ neighbours, that the family’s arrears of €13,000 must have taken a long time to build up.
Everyone is in the same boat says an employed lone mother of four teenagers living on the estate. She has no sympathy for the Moores because, she says, nearly everyone has been in arrears at some point. She struggles every week, “borrowing from Peter to pay Paul” to keep up with rent and a €15,000 credit union loan, plus ESB, cable TV and phone bills. She has been in and out of arrears and claims the council is “quite easy” to deal with and “not heavy-handed unless you owe them an awful lot of money”.
THAT’S NOT HOW the Moore family see it. This is a difficult situation where accounts are inconsistent. Ann Moore says that, when she rings senior council officials, her calls are not returned. Since the eviction the family say they have not been offered alternative accommodation.
Ann Moore admits that, as of September 2009, she and Christy owed €13,000 in rent arrears and that this was a debt built up over five years. Christy, who is unemployed and has lived elsewhere during periods of time when the couple were having difficulties, says the debt accrued over “nine or 10 years”.
Ann says she first heard of a court order to have the sheriff enforce the family’s eviction in September 2009, when she received a letter from the council stating the severity of the situation. She says it was only then she learned the eviction order had been signed off by a judge in December 2008. She insists she has made repeated attempts since the eviction to contact senior officials in the council, but her calls were unheeded.
Since last September Moore says she has voluntarily paid €150 a week to the council (the weekly rent of €100 plus an extra €50 towards arrears), without a formal arrangement in place. The council will not comment on individual cases. Since September 2009, she and Christy say, they have reduced their arrears from €13,000 to about €10,000, with the extra €50 per week and by making lump-sum payments.
Moore’s account of how the eviction came about and the council’s description of how it handles these situations are very different. The council says its “housing allocations services have offered – and will continue to offer – welfare services to the household concerned, to provide them with relevant information and support in relation to homeless services/alternative accommodation”.
Fine Gael councillor John Bailey says no family is evicted until “we have exhausted all avenues . . . €13,000 was a substantial amount of money”. The council had been “very sympathetic” to the Moore family, he says. If a debt of that size was left unpaid and the council didn’t “go in hard” there would be anarchy, he believes.
He adds that helping constituents deal with rent arrears or mortgages and debts they can’t pay due to the recession has become a full-time job. From council estates to the most well-off areas of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, 10 to 15 per cent of his constituents have serious debt problems, he estimates.
Denis O’Callaghan, a local Labour councillor for 20 years, says that in his experience the council is always willing to negotiate and that all options would have been explored before the family was evicted.
INTERVIEWED FOR THIS article, five politicians from various parties said off the record that they believed the Moore family’s situation was being used by Richard Boyd Barrett to score a political point. He rejects this, saying the eviction surprised him as much as the Moores, as he had been trying to resolve the situation. He rang Pat Kenny’s show on RTÉ Radio 1 as the eviction was taking place to draw attention to it.
He says he learned of the Moores’ rent problems first in September 2009, when Christy contacted him. Boyd Barrett says Christy, whom he describes as “a bit of a character”, distributed leaflets during the last local election for Boyd Barrett’s People Before Profit party, which has two councillors in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown.
Boyd Barrett advised Ann Moore to take control of the long-standing rent arrears problem and says she managed to meet housing officials and came to an informal arrangement that would stave off eviction, though Boyd Barrett himself wasn’t present when the agreement was made.
Following the eviction, Boyd Barrett organised a small protest at Dún Laoghaire Town Hall on Monday. At this, Ann Moore – at Boyd Barrett’s urging – used the microphone to address the 30 placard-holding friends and protesters gathered, to say thanks.
Whether or not the Moore family is being made an example of by the council, or used by third parties to score political points, the reality is that Ann Moore has seen little of her children since the eviction, as they have split up to stay with different friends. “We’re emotionally traumatised,” she says.
Another angle on a life of struggle
“I have no sympathy for the Moores,” says neighbour Carol Byrne. This 48-year-old lone mother lies awake at night in her mortgaged house in the estate the Moores lived on, wishing she had never played by the rules - getting married, buying a house and attempting to live what she calls the fairy tale.
Since her marriage broke up four years ago, she pays the €1,000 monthly mortgage that she and her ex-husband, who married in 1986, signed up to in happier times. Byrne earns €243 a week for a community-employment part-time job, which nearly covers the mortgage. She gets €830 a month in benefits, including €150 child benefit, of which she pays €210 to her mother, who borrowed €10,000 from AIB on Byrne’s behalf in 2008. That leaves her with €610 a month to live on – heat, light, phone, car loan – plus other debts, including with the Provident, a legal money lender that lends at high interest rates. She was recently hospitalised for a stroke-like migraine that paralysed one side of her body. Medical advice was to “reduce stress”, but this is impossible, she says.
“How do you get yourself out of this debt? I always thought, if you have a mortgage, you pay it even if it means you have no food.” She questions that now. “You’re worse off with a job and a mortgage. You’re better off [unemployed and] claiming. I’d love to be in the situation of only having to pay €100 a week rent. We people who own our own homes are penalised.”
