A pensioner with three weeks to find a new home before her notice of termination claims that difficulties with housing rules means she feels “like I don’t exist”.
Micheline Walsh, 78, said her imminent notice to quit her home brings up “images of the Famine”.
She cares for her elderly stroke victim husband and fears their age means they are too old to wait for a place on a lengthy housing list.
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Micheline told RTE Radio 1 that they could no longer pay their rent when she lost her job as an administrator for a language school during the pandemic.
The couple were last November given six months to get out of their rented home in Dublin last year, but that was stalled by the eviction ban.
That was lifted in March and now they are desperately scrambling to find a new home at a time of rental shortage.
Micheline went on national radio and explained that they cannot stay with family because it means they would no longer qualify for social housing and because of her husband’s medical needs.
She said: “I’ve always rented and we’ve been in our house for seven years. The rent was within reach, but my husband had a stroke and doesn’t work.
“The rent was paid by our pension and my part-time job. When Covid came, my part-time job went.
“The language school couldn’t have students. Now the landlord is selling the property. That’s the reason we have to move.
“But because I don’t have a job now, we only have our pensions, so there is no way that we can pay anything near the rents that are being asked. We registered on the housing list, which was a major effort.
“My husband had a very bad stroke. He lost his sight in half of each eye, lost the ability to read, he’s not steady on his feet, and he gets seizures. It’s a challenging situation.
“We got accepted for Housing Assistance Payment [HAP]. I searched online to find a place and you have to agree with the landlord to be a HAP tenant, but we’ve had no luck.
“We can’t move in with somebody because that takes us off the housing list. We would be deemed not homeless.
“Nobody in my family has the extra room, bearing in my mind my husband has brain damage and needs a lot of care and attention.
“It is really not fair to bring that into someone else’s home arrangement. You can’t expect someone else to put up with that.
“We are three weeks away from [moving out] at the end of May. There is nowhere to go. I spoke to the homeless section and asked, ‘What will happen when I ring you and say we need accommodation?’
“They said we’ll put in a request to central allocations for you to be placed in a homeless hostel.
“How am I going to manage? How long is that for? Is that for one night? Do I have to ring and say we need another night? It’s unthinkable.”
New figures published last month showed that there are 11,988 homeless people in Ireland and there are 1,639 families in homeless accommodation, including around 800 single-parent families.
Micheline told RTE Radio 1: “I feel embarrassed and shameful. Why am I here? I had a naïve idea that the State helps you when you are old.
“That’s the job of the State, isn’t it: to look after the vulnerable? To me homelessness was someone at the side of the street.
“Eviction brings up images of the Famine, images of dirt, inability to clean yourself, nowhere to sleep. I feel embarrassed.
“My husband knows but he lives in a bubble of his own. He’s not operating in the real world.
“When we talk about it, he gets anxious and disturbed and that’s when there is the possibility of seizures.”
She added: “We’re on the housing list, but I don’t expect to get anything in my lifetime. How many years left do I have, realistically speaking? If I get 10 years, I would be delighted. I haven’t got time to wait on the list. I just feel I don’t exist.”
The eviction ban was in place from October 31 until it was controversially lifted on March 31. Homelessness campaigners warned that lifting it would cause a tsunami of evictions.
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