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I’VE JUST MOVED into my 26th home.
I am once again surrounded by chaos, with boxes and bags dumped unceremoniously on the sitting room floor of our new rental.
I cried leaving the last place, all our familiar things are gone, the empty echoing rooms – the dismantling of a life.
It was home and a home is all we really want, just four walls and a small amount of security.
We know how lucky we are to have found somewhere to go in this unforgiving rental market. We know there are many more behind us who won’t be so lucky.
As bitter chance would have it, this new apartment is also up for sale, so we have been given an 8-month lease. It is a lifeline for now, but many of the boxes will remain unpacked because leaving is inevitable.
This will not be home, there will be no familiar things, no pictures hung.
Renting in Ireland has become a vicious and ruthless game, much like the Lotto – it could be you. But it probably won’t be.
I grew up as a child renting too and moving from place to place, it has been the story of my life and I don’t want to be in this trap for the rest of my days.
I just want to settle down somewhere with my husband, plant roots, maybe start a family.
But since Focus Ireland estimates that one in every three people in emergency accommodation is a child, having a family is definitely on the back burner until we can secure a stable, permanent home.
We want to buy a home, but in the Ireland of 2019, homeownership is becoming more and more difficult to achieve.
Proven track record
Both my husband and I are in permanent full-time employment. We earn a little more than €400 each per week, so we are in a bracket of people who can meet the rent and bills each month but after the necessities are paid for, there is not much left over.
Any small savings we manage to scrape together are inevitably eaten up by unforeseen events. Car maintenance or a doctor’s visit usually see those savings zapped.
We pay €800 a month in rent and have never missed a payment. We have a proven track record and our bank statements show that we pay that rent on time.
If we could secure a mortgage, repayments of €800 a month would allow us to buy a home at €288,000 (over 30 years, which is the average mortgage length).
Since we live in a small village that would be more than enough. But we will never be approved for a mortgage because we don’t have the ability to save the €28,000 for a deposit.
We have researched every government scheme available and there is no help for people in our situation. We are trapped in a vicious circle – an ever revolving door.
We cannot move much further away, my husband already drives an hour and a half to work in the morning and the same again each evening.
Our parents are elderly and following the recent passing of my father in law, we would like to stay within commuting distance of them.
100% mortgages
I was a student back when 100% mortgages were all the rage during the “boom”.
I’ll never forget the day that my friend, who was a second-year student in UCD got a letter from her bank offering her a 100% mortgage. She was living at home, not working and hadn’t applied for any kind of mortgage.
Luckily for her, she declined the bank’s offer – the scheme was scrapped soon after because of its role in collapsing the country’s economy.
Despite this, I think that 100% mortgages should be re-introduced.
Already I can hear the cacophony of outrage – but bear with me.
Obviously, I do not think that 100% mortgages should be handed out to students but nor do I think ordinary citizens should continue to suffer for the reckless lending of the banks.
Those mortgages failed because they were given out very irresponsibly.
Sometimes I go on Daft.ie and look at the houses for sale in the area we live in. When I do that the mortgage repayments show up below the property and they are usually less than what we are paying in rent.
I believe that people with a proven track record of paying rent at a higher rate than the mortgage payment, for a period of three years, should be able to get a 100% mortgage.
It is very frustrating to know that others with the same income, whose parents can afford to gift them a deposit, will be approved – often without showing the same consistent ability to make payments.
Since the banks no longer require you to prove that you saved the deposit yourself – these gifts demonstrate nothing whatsoever about the person’s ability to save money or to repay the loan.
My mum is on state pension of €208 per week and I think the bank’s rules amount to nothing less than discrimination on grounds of social class.
Like us, there are so many other people throughout Ireland who are victims of this unfair system.
It feels like our government are rebuilding Ireland for a select few but not for the vast majority.
Fiona Cassim is married and living in Wicklow, she works as an administrator and writes part-time.
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Well balanced and non judgemental article.. if only everyone could think and act that way…
What we need is a Whole System that works,
It’s time to drain the sespool of leaders and show them with your VOTES , who are the real bosses , they work for us ,NOT the other way around
@Karllye kripton: the politicians don’t decide what drugs get approved, to do so would drive healthcare to a dystopian system to be decided by public opinion rather than expert medical professionals, so I’m unsure how votes would achieve your desired effect
@Karllye kripton: that’ll make a huge difference .. not .. you cant vote out any of the leaders in THE HSE .. they are employees if the state …
@Vocal Outrage: Unfortunately this isn’t true. Look at Orkambi. Deemed to be not cost effective by the NCPE. Recommended not for reimbursement. Simon Harris decides to fund it. Despite this money coming at the expense of various other cost effective treatments. I wish the general public were fully aware of what a self serving decision this was, and how much it has cost the HSE, for a very marginal benefit, when you look at the overall CF population. But it looks good in the press.
@Peter Wheen: my point exactly, when you make populist medical policy decisions like that, against professional advice, then other parts of the service will suffer. I guess I was referring to how it should be
My mum was seen by many consultants in a private hospital in Dublin for pains that eventually had her bed ridden. After 4 months of various tests and different pain killers she took very ill and rushed to hospital. A simple CT scan not done previuosly by any consultant showed she was riddled with cancer and died the next day. My trust in private hospitals was questioned from that day onwards..
I remember my granfather saying he was on 9 pills a day in his late 70s. Now a day most fit 30 year olds are putting 4 tablets into themselves
Something is definitely wrong if half a million people are on anti depressiants. It’s all a scam
@Tom Padraig: Perhaps rather than blaming the medication, you should consider the circumstances that lead to people requiring antidepressants as opposed to labelling it all a scam.
@Philip Kavanagh: He is not wrong. One example would be the number of teens on Meds to treat their “ADHD” because they once told mummy to fork orf after eating a bag of skittles and downing five cans of red bull.
@Philip Kavanagh: As evidenced by the experience of those involved in the Air Corps chemical scandal, many if not most people on ADs do not need them. However they are the current quick “fix” for clinicians and a very lucrative one for industry.
The overprescription of ADs is a scourge & a scandal. The increase in anxiety & depression is being driven by what we eat, what we drink and what we breath.
ADs are one of the current unsustainable answers to an already unsustainable problem, counselling is the other.
Treating depression & anxiety along with so called suicide prevention is a fooking industry at this point.
@Ronan Sexton: He is wrong. Some people need antidepressants for a specific period, others will be on them for life. Like for most illnesses, medication is only one of the range of treatments. To write it all of as a scam is dangerous and stupid.
@Chemical Brothers: Back up your unsubstantiated claim with actual sources that “many if not most people on ADs do not need them”.
@Philip Kavanagh: The numbers on antidepressants in Ireland is simply staggering. To believe that all these people actually have mental health illnesses is simply beyond belief.
We are mass medicating a massive portion of our population out of ignorance.
I suppose the matter of not wasting billions on whats planned to be a multi tier health system for our kids in the supposed “best new hospital in the world (if you are wealthy and can afford expensive health insurance)”, would allow us buy a couple of billions more worth of drugs.
Can I ask if Dr. O’Connor believes, like a recently published Cork based gastroenterologist, that IBS is a psychosomatic illness?
“More than 50 per cent of my outpatients have symptoms caused by psychosomatic conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, which cannot be elucidated or cured by the molecular biologists”
@Chemical Brothers: wow, a little off topic, no?
@James Brady: Not really IBS and the like is overwhelming Gastroenterology Depts in all our hospitals. If all Gastroenterologists think IBS is psychosomatic then the problem is not being dealt with properly and is a further drain on the same pot of resources.
It stands to reason that if spending on expensive drugs means less money for other hospital spending then if something else is using up funds like for huge numbers of unnecessary “arse covering” endoscopy that then further eats into the same pool of money.
@Chemical Brothers: It’s not unnecessary. It is necessary to investigate or you can’t say with confidence that pt has IBS as opposed to something more serious. IBS is a diagnosis of exclusion. If gastroenterologist is arranging endoscopy to investigate, they are likely looking to rule out conditions with overlapping presentations such as coeliac, crohns, ulcerative colitis. When all investigations are negative and the symptoms are still of concern, it is not unreasonable to attempt treatments which have evidence of working in these cohorts of patients such as specific diets etc.
@Stephen Chaney: Thanks for reply. Considering the large percentage of those diagnosed with IBS in outpatient clinics would an approach of trying diet first rather than an expensive, invasive, unpleasant endoscopy procedure with attendant risk be a better course of action?
Is the endoscopy first approach being driven more by fear of missing a cancer and being sued for same rather than what may be a simpler approach?
Genuinely just asking, have had cameras both ends with nothing sinister found but have subsequently had success with dietary measures but not necessarily measures that consultants are familiar with.
This is one of the best articles offering a comprehensive and fair analysis on our Health System, I can’t fault it. This should be framed.
Agree with Dr O’Connor – balanced views sustained by experience. Have been treated well in both systems, though public AnE requires patience.
In the UK there are set targets for delivery – something like Cancer surgery within 4 weeks maximum. If we set our public hospitals targets and then offered the patient free private care if not met that would focus minds on efficiencies.
@Pat Redmond: or just pay hospitals (and drs etc) per procedure. The countries with the shortest waiting lists are those with systems based on insurance where hospitals are paid like that.
he makes some valid points, but the chances of Ireland producing a high quality low cost health service are slim. We don’t do low cost for things like that in this country.
Great article and much that needs to be said- just would like to suggest another option- we need to recognise that the price tag on patented medicines bears no relationship to the cost of bringing the drug to market- but is the price unilaterally set by Pharma and is based on the maximum profit it can bring to its shareholders- which for life saving or life enhancing drugs is very high indeed. We need to bring some balance of power to the negotiating table to prevent monopoly abuse- ultimately by replacing the monopoly with an alternative incentive such as grants for R&D.
Off topic.
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