“There’s often times where I’m thinking, is this going to affect my daughter in years to come? Is she going to say to me, ‘Mammy, why weren’t you able to give me a home?’”
Lisa Kiely (31) has been living in emergency accommodation in a hotel room in Limerick city with her partner and their two-year-old daughter for 10 months.
She is expecting a second baby in less than two months’ time and is struggling to see a way out.
The family had been renting an apartment in the city for €1,200 a month, with the Government’s Housing Assistance Payment covering €450 of their rent.
Kiely worked as a nail technician and her partner worked in a warehouse, but they were struggling to cover the remainder of their rent. When they were evicted from that home, they entered a rental market that had completely changed.
“It just jumped out of nowhere ... it was anywhere from €1,800 to over €2,000 for a place. All your wages would be gone on rent, you wouldn’t even be able to buy yourself cereal,” she says.
Limerick city saw the largest annual increase in rents, for both existing and new tenancies, in the country last year, according to the latest Residential Tenancies Board (PRTB) data.
Rents in new tenancies increased by 12.2 per cent from the third quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, now standing at an average of €1,556.
While the cost of renting in Limerick is one issue, the availability of properties is another. Kiely has been looking for a place to rent, but because of the few places being advertised, coupled with the high rents being charged, she feels she is “locked out” of the market.
“Even when you go to visit and see the home, you hear nothing back. The minute you mention HAP, it’s gone,” she says.
Kiely speaks a lot about childhood trauma and her fears for her daughter growing up in these conditions.
“For ages it was a constant battle. She wanted to go home. She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t go home,” she says. “She didn’t understand why we were in this one room. Then she started making friends down in the hotel, but they’re moving out constantly, and it’s like a loss to her each time, so it’s really, really upsetting.”
A search of property website daft.ie for two-bed homes in Limerick city returns 18 results, with rents of €1,350-€3,500 a month.
Conor Sheehan, Labour Party housing spokesman and Limerick City TD, says the city has become “a victim of its own success”.
Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced a €927 million expansion of its plant in the city last September, adding 150 jobs and bringing its staff to 450. Johnson & Johnson also has a large presence in the city, as do Stryker and Cook Medical.
“Economically, Limerick is booming. There is a lot of employment here in an already strained housing system,” Sheehan says.
Two Savoy Hotel employees who spoke to The Irish Times while walking Limerick city’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, say their employer often helps staff to find accommodation and that this is not unusual in the city.
Sean Begley lived with his brother while looking for a place, until the Savoy organised rental accommodation for him.
He pays €1,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment his employer has leased from a landlord to house staff working at the hotel.
“I have to do overtime to afford it. It’s a lot of money, especially when you’re not on the best wages,” Begley says.
Chelsea Cahill pays €1,500 for a three-bedroom apartment in the city and says the conditions of the house are “desperate”.
“There are holes in the ceiling, the heating barely works. I think it [the rental market] has gotten worse over the years, but this year is especially bad,” she says.
Sheehan agrees that Limerick’s rental market has overheated.
“House prices and rents in Limerick are trending worse than the national average,” he adds. “If you look at the private rental market at any given moment, there is nothing there. Similarly, the average price of a three-bed semi in Limerick is now €300,000, give or take. So things are especially bad here."
He notes that Limerick City has not had a senior government minister for a number of years, suggesting it is missing the political focus to move on projects such as Land Development Agency sites in the city that are yet to be built on.
Vacancy and dereliction is an issue too, the TD says, not only in private units but also in the social housing bracket, with more than 200 empty council houses awaiting refurbishment in the city.
There are “huge problems” with homelessness, he says, and people are in “dire straits”, particularly those who are above the income threshold for social housing but who cannot find a place on the private rental market.
Una Burns, head of advocacy and communications at housing charity Novas, says there has been a “significant rise” in the number of families experiencing homelessness in the city, with many of them, like Kiely, living in hotels.
Homelessness data published monthly by the Department of Housing shows there were 362 adults accessing emergency accommodation in the last week of January 2024, compared to 489 adults in the same week this year.
There are in excess of 100 families living in hotels in Limerick city at the moment, with more living in family hubs, Burns says.
The type of people entering homelessness has changed, too, she says, with more cases involving the “financially homeless” than ever.
“You would have more people experiencing homelessness now because of just simply the lack of opportunity to access housing and the cost of that rent when it’s available,” she says.
The lack of cooking and washing facilities and the cramped conditions these people are living in have a “huge impact” on children’s development and their social wellbeing, Burns says. Living in emergency accommodation also impacts people’s employment prospects, given visitors are not allowed into the hotel to mind children, pushing more parents out of the workplace.
Living in one room can be very difficult if there are children of a range of ages, Burns says, leading to situations where “a child can go into school very tired because the baby’s been waking them all night”.
Ventilation tends to be poor, cooking facilities are very limited so nutrition is impacted, and overall the experience of homelessness has a “significant and profound impact across all aspects of someone’s life”, Burns says.
Meanwhile, Lisa Kiely is preparing for the arrival of her baby, throwing out half of her and her family’s clothes to make as much room as she can.
Inside the hotel room they call home, there is a double and a single bed, an air fryer, a microwave and a plug-in hob on the dresser. There are baskets of clothes on the floor and a pram is stored in the bath.
“It’s so cramped. You don’t have space to breathe ... people shouldn’t have to live the way we are,” she says.
