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NEARLY A YEAR after moving into their council home, Keith and Sinead still feel, as they describe it, “cabinised”. After eleven years living in a converted workshed in a family member’s back garden, their terraced house sometimes just feels too big.
That feeling is ebbing away – but only slowly. “It’s a transition,” as Keith puts it.
It mostly affects them in the evening – once the rest of the family has gone to sleep, the sitting room feels too quiet to sit in and watch TV. Instead, they’ll often go up to bed early to watch a film, happier knowing the kids are safely tucked up nearby.
The couple first spoke to The Journal back in 2017. Keith had emailed us in response to a story about the latest homeless figures - eager to share the story of the lengths his family had to go to, as the housing crisis took hold, to keep a roof over their heads.
As a young couple, the pair wanted to set up their home close to family members in Dublin but found themselves priced out of the mid-2000s Celtic Tiger housing market.
They eventually settled on a home big enough for their growing family in the Midlands. Keith worked in construction and most of his jobs were at sites in the capital. He says he didn’t mind the commute as the kids were settling into their community and he was proud to have secured their home and mortgage.
But the timing couldn’t have been worse. They closed on the house in May 2008. That September, Ireland became the first country in the Eurozone to enter recession. In January 2009, Keith’s hours were cut to three days a week.
“That’s when everything just tumbled and tumbled,” said Keith. By the end of the summer, he was out of a job.
The country’s economy was contracting faster than any in the developed world around this time, with the numbers on the Live Register doubling in the space of the year. The Fianna Fáil-Greens government introduced welfare cuts in December 2009. A year later, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan oversaw the most austere Budget in the nation’s history.
The family’s experience mirroring that of households all over the country, Keith and Sinead realised their family home would soon be at risk. They fell behind on bills, finding it difficult to keep the house heated and food in the fridge.
“Our kids were struggling going to school – I wouldn’t even be able to make them a proper lunch,” Sinead said.
They tried to stick it out – but after the severely cold winter of 2010/2011 the family had all had enough. They could have lived there for another few years, but didn’t want to stay in a house they couldn’t afford.
Making plans for what they hoped would be a relatively temporary arrangement in Dublin, Keith decided to take his workshed apart and load it onto the back of a truck.
As Sinead tells it: “He said ‘I’m going to take that down with one of the lads tomorrow and we’re going to stay in my ma’s back garden for a while’.”
Renting out their old house didn’t work for them – the Midlands location wasn’t a desirable one for tenants anymore, and the mortgage debt was still mounting up.
After seeking financial advice, the couple decided to surrender the house back to the bank and walk away.
Keith’s work came back almost immediately after they moved to Dublin. They were able to rent for a short time, but the idea was to convert and extend the workshed and to set up home in the cabin for the medium-term as they considered their options. (We’re not using Keith and Sinead’s real names in this article as they didn’t have proper planning permission for the structure).
Though compact, the back garden home had a functional bathroom and shower, and a kitchenette area with a microwave and grill for the kids’ breakfasts and lunches. Sinead used the kitchen in the main house to make their evening meals.
They moved in in 2011. It soon became apparent that the overcrowding would be a problem, but the family were sheltered and safe for now. The couple’s older children typically slept for the night in Keith’s parents’ home, with the younger ones staying in the cabin.
Years after moving from the Midlands, however, they were still in debt for their former home so getting a deposit together for a new house was out of the question. And with such a large family – they had seven children when we first spoke in 2017, with an eighth born more recently – there was no long-term prospect of being able to afford Dublin rents.
They had been added to the housing list for their local authority, but were told to expect a long wait.
Keith and Sinead spoke to The Journal again a few weeks ago at the kitchen table of their new council home. Looking back now on their time living in the cabin, they sometimes marvel at how they managed to get through it all.
“I’m not saying that we weren’t grateful for what we had, we were – because there were people living on the streets,” Sinead said.
“But like that, you’d miss the essentials, your bathroom… having your own washing machine, as a woman with a lot of kids.
“What got to me the most was, when the older kids were down the house and if they came down the next day and said, ‘I was sick last night’. I’d be like, ‘why didn’t you come down?’ They were afraid to knock because it was during the night. Things like that you’d miss – or just sitting at a table with your kids, all your kids together.
“I’d remember Christmas time in particular, when the Toy Show came on – you’d be looking at your kids all just sitting there on a floor in this little, tiny space.”
“It all got on top of us,” Keith said. “I mean, we never fell out fell out, but, you know, you’d have your days, you’d have to kind of keep your distance.”
The family had its share of ups and downs during their time in the cabin – as they passed the decade mark on the housing list, Keith suffered a work injury that put him out of action for a prolonged period.
His natural optimism took a beating. “You’d always see me upbeat because I always just concentrate on getting through the day… but the hope was dangerous.”
One of their children – now in her twenties – had long struck out on her own at this stage, with their next eldest approaching his eighteenth birthday. While they had been assessed by their local authority as needing a four-bedroom house, they’d also told council staff at this point that they’d be more than happy to take a three-bed one.
Just as it seemed that they’d never have a chance to move on from their back garden cabin, they finally got good news.
The morning it happened, as Sinead tells it, they were getting ready to mark a special occasion for the couple and the event had got her thinking again about their situation.
“The night before I actually fell asleep crying because I was saying, ‘Oh God, I’m sick of this’.
“Then next of all the phone rang, and it was the woman from council. And she said to me, ‘are you sitting down?’
“I just knew they’d be giving me an offer. I just burst into tears. Then the kids and I were crying, you know, it was just a mad, mad, feeling.”
Their new house was “a mansion” as far as their younger kids were concerned. “We have stairs,” Sinead remembers one shouting the day they moved in.
“When we got this house, immediately the youngest little fella, I put him into the bath upstairs. I was out sweeping the landing. I would just hear him saying, ‘this is great. We can have a bath every day we want now’.
“And I was like, ‘Ah God’, listening to him in the bath, you know – we hadn’t had that for years, you know, they were able to have showers but it was a novelty having a bath.”
After almost a year at their new address, said Keith, “we wake up still some mornings and can’t believe we’re in a house”.
Asked for their thoughts on recent moves by the government to relax planning for cabin homes in back gardens, both said it would be manageable for a family for a few years – but that there was a danger of viewing it as a longer-term solution.
Said Keith: “It would be well manageable to to stick it out for three years – but when you go into the eight years, you go into the ten years, you go beyond that it’s too much
“But it’s never too late. And now that we’re here, I’d say in another year or two we’ll be used to living in the house.”
“We’ve been through the mill – but we made it through the mill,” Sinead said.
The latest publicly available data on social housing wait times shows there were over 12,000 households spending seven years or more on the lists of their local authorities at the end of 2023.
Just under 59,000 households qualified for social housing support at that time, with the four Dublin local authorities accounting for over 40% of that number.
Dermot Murphy, Director of Services at Depaul Ireland, said single people and larger families were the two groups most impacted by the shortage of social homes around the country.
He said that despite government initiatives to build new homes, there remains a huge gap between the demand for social housing and the current supply.
Ber Grogan, Executive Director of the Simon Communities of Ireland, said the construction industry had long tended to favour two- and three-bedroom houses and apartments.
“I think sometimes, because there aren’t as many larger families and at the same time there aren’t as many four-bed houses or apartments, they just get pushed down the waiting list.
She added: “We need to be building the units that meet the actual need of the people on the waiting lists. It’s not just about the social housing targets, it’s about the right type of social housing in the local authority areas that are needed, with all the amenities to support that.”
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