Former Tathony House Tenant Speaks Out Against Illegal Wexford Mass Eviction

36 households in Wexford have been given eviction notices by Wexford-based firm Patchflow Ltd. It is illegal to evict more than 10 households in one go. We know this because we faced the eviction of 34 tenancies at Tathony House in Dublin 8.

The Tyrrelstown Amendment says that a landlord has to leave tenants in situ in cases like this. The only way they can get around the clause is to demonstrate that leaving tenants in situ would reduce the sales price by 20% or cause the landlord “undue hardship”.

Patchflow Limited are illegally evicting dozens of families in the middle of an unprecendented housing crisis. These families will have nowhere to go except emergency accommodation.

We beat the eviction of 34 households from Tathony House on a number of grounds:

• The landlord hadn’t notified the RTB of the evictions on the same day as giving notice to tenants.
• The landlord had put the wrong date on our eviction notice
• The landlord never signed the declaration page of the eviction notice.

We also fought on the grounds that the landlord never produced a valuation of the building from before the day he had signed the eviction notices. Without such a valuation how could he prove a 20% sales price reduction or “hardship”?

We held regular public protests to keep our story in the news and make sure that there was political pressure on to sort the case. We got Dublin City Council to offer to buy the building and when the landlord refused our fight in the RTB won everyone an extra year and a half and no one went homeless.

In the end everyone found somewhere to live and me and my wife moved into social housing. But we shouldn’t have had to fight for 18 months of sleepless nights and stress worrying about where we were going to end up. The same goes for tenants in Wexford now facing the same stress.

We have a housing crisis because government after government has pandered to the market and intentionally withdrawn state built housing from housing stock to keep the profits flowing for the developers and builders.

We need a state construction company - but let’s be honest under the current market driven system it’d become a quango like Irish Water. That’s why we need wider political change too. We need to put working class people in the driving seat of a planned economy, where no tenant can ever be evicted by a money hungry landlord.

The landlord at Tathony House, Ronan McDonnell, eventually sold the crumbling 1840s built building for €5.65 million. The building is now homeless accommodation with the new owners being paid by Dublin City Council to house people who’ve faced eviction from their homes!

Patchflow Limited shouldn’t be allowed to profiteer by destroying lives. The local CATU, the tenant’s union, branch are advising the residents. To all those facing this fight my heart goes out to you, I know only too well what you are going through.

The key thing is to organise and fight this. Make it a national scandal. That way the government, local council and RTB will have to do something to help the tenants. Quiet tenants get quietly evicted. Make as much noise as possible.