“It’s a very Irish thing that not owning your own house, especially at my age, there’s a sense of shame around it,” says Jenny Roche.
“That’s why I think our housing crisis is seemingly so insolvable because if shame wasn’t as big a factor as it is, people would be shouting and screaming on the streets.”
Roche, who has worked in Ireland and New York as an actor, director and screenwriter, including for RTÉ’s Fair City, has become part of the State’s hidden homeless, along with her son.
Not reflected in the official homeless figures, which last month hit a new record of 15,378 people, the 58-year-old is staying with a friend, having been evicted after her former landlord decided to sell the home in which she lived for some 20 years.
Her 20-year-old son is also living with a friend and, for now, the pair are “relying on the kindness of others”, she says.
The Irish Times reported earlier this month that Roche, who is a lecturer in film at the University of Galway, was ordered to vacate her rented property in Moycullen, Co Galway, having overheld for more than eight months.
An initial Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) hearing ruled in the landlord’s favour but gave Roche until May 31st to vacate the property, giving her time while her son is still attending college.
However, she was “stunned” to learn that her landlord appealed the decision, with an RTB tribunal overruling the previous order and giving the pair 28 days to vacate, meaning they had to leave two months earlier.
Hoping the tenant-in-situ scheme would allow her to stay in her home, she spent nine months awaiting an offer to be made by her local council which was ultimately declined by her former landlord, who argued it was below market rate.
“I had to take time off work on sick, I’m on anti-depressants and I’m on sleeping pills for the last year. I haven’t had mental health difficulties in my life, but this has been horrendous,” she says.
Since receiving the notice of termination last year, Roche says she has tried “every avenue possible”, including searching for other properties to rent, but has found landlords stop replying once she mentions Housing Assistance Payments.
“Looking at the market rents, there’s just no way. I earn about €1,900 a month and that’s what rents are,” she says.
Alongside pondering the purchase of a mobile home, she has also considered importing a modular home from Latvia which she hoped to install on her mother’s land in Tuam, though she estimates the cost of doing so would amount to some €200,000, including various costs such as labour and materials.
She has searched properties to purchase countrywide, but all fall outside of her price range, regardless of a loan from family, she says.
“Every avenue you go down, you have these fresh dawnings of hope, but you come across more barriers,” she adds.
Over the years, Roche tried to secure a mortgage several times but was unsuccessful due to insufficient savings while renting.
“Unless I won the lotto, there’s no prospect of me ever getting enough money to just buy a house,” she says.
Her income while working as a freelance screenwriter for Fair City, in addition to lecturing, was above the threshold to qualify for social housing.
She believes there is an environment of “competitive suffering” for social housing, one in which those hoping to qualify must prove how “worse off” they are.
“There’s an awful lot of people caught in the gap between eligibility for social housing and eligibility for a mortgage,” she says.
Once she stopped writing Fair City scripts, her income fell within the threshold for social housing, and she has been on the list for more than four years.
“Galway City Council have been very nice, I have found them very sympathetic and very empathetic, but they’re so overwhelmed,” she says, adding that council officials told her to stay out of official homeless services for as long as possible, as “nothing is available”.
“I think what you’re expected to feel, and it’s very hard not to feel, is shame,” she says, believing renters in the Republic are “second-class citizens” of sorts, something she feels “viscerally”.
“There’s so many like me,” she says.
“There’s such unnecessary suffering, and around that, there’s this really convenient complacency and ignorance. This is not like one or two people down on their luck, this is a consequence of political decisions over decades.
“I’m 58, I have a lot of family and friends, I’m not going to be stuck that I won’t have a couch to sleep on, but that is what they’re relying on, that a lot of people won’t be stuck and that they won’t want to talk about it,” she adds.
