The Rich Irish Men Behind Nursing Home Eviction

Frank Stewart is 88 years old, wheelchair bound and suffering from dementia. His wife, Elizabeth is 84. They are being thrown out of their home so that a few rich Irish men can make money.

Elizabeth said: “It is really terrifying and we have nowhere else to go. All our lives, we worked hard and then we decided to rent this house and we thought this was going to be our last move.”

You see the nursing home was owned by the Sonas Group and the attached houses would be covered by HIQA rules around nursing homes. What did the owners do? They sold the nursing home off to one fund while they set up another to buy the homes.

Even the original planning permissions shows the homes were meant to be part of the nursing home. That’s one of the reasons the old and sick residents moved in.

The new landlords are John Mangan and Declan Feely, aquiring the homes through their Athlone based company Nasso BK Holdings Ltd. But you see John Mangan and Declan Feely were also directors at the Sonas Group. It’s the same people.

They split the homes from the nursing home so they could sell the homes off. This is after years of taking millions in state funds through the fair deal scheme as the Sonas Group owned 12 nursing homes and many retirement villages across Ireland.

John Mangan sits as a director on the board of 49 companies including the Sonas Group, Sonas Asset Holdings, Mangan Wholesale and Mangan Property Ltd.

Medwind Holdings, the parent company of Sonas, was sold off to Ethos Care. Ethos operates with Lugus Capital an Irish real estate investment fund. The director of Ethos is former rugby player Mick O’Driscoll.

Ethos has partnered up with US fund HIG who also run notorious landlord Grayling properties, critised by tenant union CATU for it’s “buy, renovate, evict, sell” model of operations.

Isn’t it great our nursing homes are in the hands of such people?

This case cuts rights to the heart of the problem with capitalism. Everything is a commodity from nursing homes to residential homes. The ruthless bastards who own these “assets” will kick old people out onto the streets to make a few quid.

And the government provides the legislative framework within which these sharks operate, allowing them to set up nursing homes that should have all been HSE run from the start. But outsourcing and privatisation is the name of the game.

There are about 550 nursing homes in Ireland 80% are provided by the private and voluntary sectors, not the state which accounts for only 16% of beds. It’s government policy that has thrown our old people to the sharks to feed on them.

It’s the same with housing.

We need a new system where vital needs like housing or healthcare aren’t commodities to be sold to the highest bidder no matter what the social cost. That means workers rising up to take command over a democratically planned economy where rich Irish leeches like John Mangan and Declan Feely can never put the sick and old out on the streets.