Sadly, with this Fianna Fail, led Government, with the Blue Shirts, we are Back to Evictions again? This time, they are called Vultures???

Dublin Tenement Life.

I remember an interview I did with an elderly woman who first lived in Hill Street Dublin in the 1940, she recalled the landlord evicted her and her four children onto the street. She was living in one room up the top of a tenement house located near Summerhill Dublin. She recalled the rain coming down the walls onto the bed, she’d wake up during the night, they had to get out of the bed pull it into the middle of the room where it was dry.

In one part of the room she could look up and see the sky, there was a big hole in the ceiling the roof slates were gone, men use to clime onto the roof and rob the roof slates to fix other peoples roofs. The glass in the windows were broken she had rags stuffed into the frame to keep the rain out. She had to go down six flights of stairs with a bucket to get water from the water tap in the yard. Her husband was in the Irish army down the country, his army pay was very little to live on.

She complained to the landlord about the state of the room, he did nothing to repair the roof or the windows, she withheld one weeks rent money, three shillings and sixpence. She went out with the children when she came home all her bits of furniture was on the street. The landlord had another family in the room. She recalled it lashed rain the evening all her bits of furniture clothes and mattresses was destroyed with rain. Neighbours took her and the children into their rooms. She recalled walking the street looking for another tenement room.

She ended up living down in a basement in Mountjoy Square, it was dry but full of rats, she recalled the children getting very sick from the stench of the basement room. She recalled men women and children dying in the tenements.