A mother-of-four from County Dublin has spoken out about her fears that she and her children will be homeless by Christmas.
Fiona O’Connor currently lives with her four children in Milltown and is on the rent supplement scheme.
However, her landlord has told her that she must vacate the property by Christmas Day and while she had been promised alternative accommodation by her local authority, she is yet to be rehoused.
The worried mother, whose youngest child is 18 months old, told The Irish Mirror that she had repeatedly appealed to local councillors and TDs for help but to no avail.
“I’m stressed out. I’ve been crying for months. I’m not sleeping, I’m not eating. I don’t know if I’m coming or going. The kids don’t know where they’re going to be. I’m not blaming the landlord, it’s more the council,” she said.
“I’ve lived in this area my whole life. There is nowhere to even put down a deposit. Nowhere is accepting rent allowance and the ones that do aren’t right. We’re looking for a three-bed place so it would be two kids to a room each. Not that I even have the deposit to hand over.”
Fiona claims that she was originally told that she was “at the top of the list” but has since been informed that there are 17 people ahead of her.
“They had promised me. I had always been worried about maybe something happening. But then I found out that there’s loads ahead of me. I didn’t think it would happen like this. What I was told was that people were being moved from other accommodation like homeless shelters into homes. So they’re moving me from a home to a shelter to find me another home. Doesn’t make sense to me.”
Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council told the newspaper that it would not discuss individual cases but said that it was working with “very limited access to social housing” and that “private renter households whose inability to continue to afford their tenancy arrangements is combining with the dynamics of the Dublin housing market to produce pathways into homelessness”.
