Philip, you are dam right, now I hope all of the people who post here saying that it’s not that bad out there for people see what it is really like for a Hugh amount of us, just looking at that picture says it all, how someone could ever show that bed to a mother and her children is heartbreaking, anyone in there right mind would have put it in the dump the minute it was soiled,

Perfectly put Philip.

Some of the comments on here are quite shocking too. I’m actually quite disgusted and pretty ashamed to think that there are people out there that believe that this can be excused in any way.

Given that this is part of a Sinn Fein election stunt I am very skeptical. After all we now know that the HSE never asked a mother if her child still had Downs Syndrome. This was just a big election lie!
Let’s await judgement and see what the Authority have to say.

I would hate to see the other side of the mattress. Are we seeing the shiny side up?

Unbelievable!!! What kind of organisation would even offer someone a mattress in that condition…?

where does it say anything about this story being part of any party’s election stunt Richie?? The elections are long over. It’s just you using your SF paranoia to deflect from the story. Doing a masters in spin doctoring are you?

Dave
Why would I want to deflect from the true story? Sinn Fein have considerable form in the area of false flags….how about the text to the last Presidential Debate on RTE. this damaged a candidate on a complete falsehood.How about the hugely sad story about a mother being asked if her child still had Downs Syndrome, especially when it never happened…..how about the picture produced for the Journal by a Sinn Fein Councillor…..And on and on and on we go!

It wasn’t the HSE that asked the mother if her child still had Down’s Syndrome, it was the German company contracted by the HSE. Make sure you get your facts correct before calling people liars.

“Sinn Fein Election stunt”, which election would this be Richard? Did you sleep through polling day?

And I suppose you want WHO to pay for all that Coddler?
Young hard working people like myself resent having to pay for other peoples mistakes and lack of action.

taking 10k off the wages and pensions of every td,minister,retired minister/td and a few lads at the top of the public sector would sort this out but hey this is ireland we like to bleed the middle and lower classes first

Some good points raised there Coddler but what do you do with the people who abuse the system. This mattress / housing unit was used by someone before being offered to this family. And this person or persons clearly had no regard for what they were given.

So true . It is nearly worse today

@ ‘The Truth Hurts’ (…as if you have a clue!)

All of the social housing can be provided on a cost neutral basis, and as it is near always provided on a lower sq ft basis than private housing, and does not need to pay the speculative & market controlling excess profits and rents to greedy private landlords and developers, it will be cheaper & affordable, no question.

So, it is merely a question of investment finance, at low public sector interest rates (as opposed to Joe mug mortgage rates) easily repaid from rents. Totally self-financing investment.

By the public sector +always+ ensuring adequate social & affordable housing is available, this would also ensure that ‘private’ rents are held down to a reasonable level, and for accommodation of a proper standard.

So, we ALL benefit from having proper public participation in housing provision – by not allowing a rip off private sector to perpetually control a market of ‘scarcity’ and inflated prices.

Of course, we will need to get politicians, senior public servants and others influencing public policy, and their greedy, self-serving snouts out of this rip off property development/speculation business themselves, or ‘policy’ will never change!

Oh, and no more vast separate ‘Ghettoes’ of social housing, high unemployment and crime – ALL new housing estates MUST have mixed housing size/quality provision. No more ‘poor’ apartheid that perpetually creates new generations of social exclusion & lack of opportunity.

Well said Mike.

TTH,
I resent ordinary people being forced to sleep on blood and urine soaked mattresses while the financial elite whose gross failures and greed triggered the recession forcing so many into homelessness have had their €100+ billion speculative gambling debt paid for by Irish citizens with the collusion of 2 successive governments.

Well she can hardly complain, it’s not like she is paying for the mattress. Get a job and pay your own way in
life

@tth your name is so ironic. The law of the jungle has been superseded (some time ago) by the concept of even basic human decency, but this fact seems to have escaped your notice.

You are an idiot.

……When you are middle class, working poor, debt slave who paid 10′s/100′s of thousands of Euros in mortgage payments to a criminal bank over the last 10 years.
You normally have to rely on hard work, relocation, emigration or (in the short term) the generosity of your family.

I don’t recall any free accommodation being part of the deal?

Tommy – I’m referring to the single moms that don’t work. They just don’t want to move away from their social circle. Housing your children should take priority over all of that, shouldn’t it?

Who minds the kids when these women need to somehow scrape the money together to travel from the backend of beyond to their jobs in Dublin? Kids also need a support network.

Many don’t have jobs, Tom as well you know. Do you think it is better to be homeless in Dublin than not homeless outside of Dublin? It’s as simple as that

@ Tommy, if the parent is working whats stopping the same person minding them after they commute to Dublin? If your options are (a) spend an hour travelling and have a safe clean home for your family or (b) live on a pi$$ drenched, blood stained mattress in a homeless shelter, then there is no choice to make.

Plenty of people commute because they can’t afford to live in Dublin.

Commuting is also an expensive business! Who minds her kids when shes commuting? Many homeless in Dublin arent from Ireland or Dublin for that matter.
Let embassies deal with their fellow country men and women who are homeless, lets send everyone who is homeless back to their own counties and let this Dublin lady stay in her own county.

Aaron, if a woman commutes from Longford to Dublin for work and her kids are also in Longford, how do you suggest the granny in Dublin who used to mind them now does so?

Well the woman has a couple of options Tommy. Firstly she could look for a job closer to home. Secondly, you don’t have to go all the way to fecking Longford to find cheap rental accommodation. A quick search on a couple of the commuter counties will get you a 3 bed house in Arklow for €650, a 2 bed apartment in Navan for €600 or a 2 bed apartment in Drogheda for €550 and you’re no more than an hour from the city center with good train and bus links.

As for the granny? Why can’t she drop them to the granny and then make her way to work?

The problem is people will come up with any excuse possible not to move and look for everything to be handed to them.

Gob shite sargon. You obviously dont know any single mothers.
How has this got to do with anything in article in first place.
Oh you are talking about the one who did have a job and paid mortgage on a house that in end turned out not to be hers and she would live anywhere just not back in the house but preferred if she could live near her mother? I see.

Reminder if you are not on the Kildare list you dont get a house there,if you are not on the list for cork you dont get a house there. Etc……

Disgusting that any human should be asked to sleep in those conditions and yet they can refurbish their fg offices to tune of 1 million euro.
Are the Irish people blind.
I knew a girl good few years back ended up alone and pregnant with her 2 year old kid (homeless) she was an orphan herself. She was put in a hostel with drunks and one of them robbed her and hit her.
Frightening stuff if it was true.

Moms?? Why are Americans always on this site?

Aaron if the kids are in school till 3 and mam works till 5 so gets home to arklow at 6, who minds the kids? If she cant afford rent, she can hardly afford that kind of childcare and transport costs. Perhaps we could ask the local Catholic mother and babies home to reopen but that didnt end too well the last time.

I agree Rob!

What are you sh&^ing on about? Idiot

Tommy,
I’d suggest you ask the many city working moms who already moved to the countryside in order to be able to afford a decent living. You know what, they are actually able to make alternative arrangements, to make new friends and find alternative solutions.

What I find interesting is that again you are referring to “these women”.

Sargon

Families become homeless for many a reason .. I’m sure that not wanting to move down the country would be one of them ..

sargon , its not that simple to just move to another area if you are in receipt of sw ,ras or rent allowance there are restrictions set in local authority rules that mean unless you can provide some form of evidence of a ‘connection’ (family, work ,education) to an area you can not move there and if you do you will be classed as making yourself homeless and no longer entitled to rent allowance, ras etc for a minimum of 6 months, you will also be barred from applying to the local authority for housing for a period of 12 months .
our landlord is selling our current home (we rent through ras scheme) there are no ‘suitable’ l/a houses available in this are, we could not afford to rent privately as prices are so high , so we looked at other areas(counties) we found anumber of places ,all of which were (as you said ) cheaper to rent than our present home and therefore would have represented a saving in the amount of rent assistance/subsidy to be paid.
but because of the ‘rules’ in place we are not allowed to move to another county or even area with in this county . unless this rule is changed the situation will not change.

Sean do you know many single mothers who became homeless and had to move miles away from home?
If you do, what did they do about childcare and travel costs if they could barely afford to pay rent in Dublin even though they were walking distance to work and had the help of their families to mind the kids?

As for your ‘these women’ point, I happen to know a few of ‘these women’. I am related to a couple of them and unfortunately pushing them away from their families and jobs doesnt help them and their kids.

Further to Eric’s comments above – even if someone was to rent outside of Dublin, there are initial costs that also need to be addressed. If a family is on the brink of, or is already homeless, where do you expect them to get their first months rent AND deposit?

They don’t work tommy, cop on and wake up to reality

@Sargon Your unilateral thinking makes you a perfect fit for a government bureaucratic job. I’d say go for it.

More spin doctoring Richie?

And you can be sure he’s not the only one Richard.

What’s so inhuman about stating the obvious Dave?
How “single” is a woman who hasn’t been married yet has multiple children with the same father?
Why should she have preference to state funds, over someone who is married with kids (or no kids for that matter)?

@ Gathering … Your remark was inhuman, these are human beings you are talking about. For whatever reason they have fallen on hard times, as many do now a day. You cannot reduce people to euros and cents. Her marital status should not come into it. You would not give a dog a mattress such as that to sleep on. It seems to be forgotten by you and those who agree with your thinking that billions are been hived off from state funds to look after the welfare of banks and bondholders. Why should they have preference to state funds when the result is that this is what is left to be offered to people? Have we traveled so far back to Dickensian times that it is now a crime to be poor, homeless and needy?

That’s strange Dave a lot of these “unfortunate” people seem to have fallen on “hard times”
“in good times”
and some even in
“all of the times”

Young skint unemployed women having multiple babies that the state ends up providing for,
when working couples have to work and save for years before they can afford to have even one child.
What about the working poor in the middle who are being squeezed from scroungers (top and bottom) to pay for these “entitlements”?
140,000 families (conservatively 500,000 family members) in mortgage arrears?
400,000 families (conservatively 1.5 million family members) in negative equity?
50% of all SME loans in arrears?
Yet the government keeps piling it on with LPT, USC, Water charges,
unfit for purpose criminalising insolvency legislation etc etc etc.

Let’s see a few documentaries and articles on Ireland’s working poor Dave.
You know the ones you don’t hear whining on Joe Duffy.
Why dont you hear them?
Because they are too busy working around the clock to provide shelter and food for their kids (and for the kids of the scroungers for that matter).

@Gathering your money- So how is Part II of “Mein Kampf” coming along? I can’t wait to lau… I mean read it.

@ VA
What’s so “Mein Kampf” about stating a few obvious facts about the situation??

The sick fact in Ireland, is that the genuine people who have worked hard to pay taxes all their life
and who have genuinely fallen on hard times, have to stand in the queue behind multi generational dole lifer scroungers and scallies who clog up the country’s social welfare system.

Only a psycho would offer a mattress with piss on it to another human being, let alone a mother with kids.

Agreed VA
In this case (as I have said above) the “psycho” offering this “mattress” is probably a senior civil servant, a judge, a solicitor, a TD or other elite crony come landlord getting top dollar from the state to house the needy.
Why don’t the journal name and shame the owners of these hovels?

But my point is when you are middle working class in Ireland and you fall on hard times
you don’t get offered any mattress
let alone a p1ssed stained one in a room of your own.
You get offered the end of a very long dole queue full of scroungers
or a boat/plane ticket to a job in another country.

Or the prospect of having your name published on Shatter’s debt offenders list.

There are 10′s of thousands of small 1-2 property working class landlords throughout the country who generally provide a high standard of accommodation,
and the government is financially murdering them on a daily basis,
You’ll find that these stinking hovels are owned by the inbreed elites who treat joe public like filthy peasants.

Obviously BTL’s in Arrears.

Hi Dave.
Will your Tech company be offering you a job in Asia when they relocate there for tax and labor cost purposes?

@ Dave – And what happens to the tenants already leasing the properties? They either remain which means there are no additional rental properties on the market to reduce the current rates or they have to vacate which means additional competition for the available properties.

There is no quick fix for an increase in rental prices because the supply will never keep up with the demand in a capital city. Whats needed is for better public amenities and transport links to commuter towns so people don’t feel the need to be living in the city center.

@Gathering, they probably would, but my company are not in Ireland for tax purposes. They are already in Asia and remain in Ireland for reasons that are not what you mentioned.

Don’t worry about Buy To Lets Dave.
I’m sure the landlords who own them,
and who have paid 10′s/100′s of thousands in deposits, mortgage interest, stamp duty, nppr, lpt up keep
etc etc etc etc etc etc, over the years
are doing their bit to provide shelter for people
in the absence of a strong government.
What are you doing to help?

If LL’s lose their properties and new LL’s take over who are solvent then banks will be able to offer more mortgages so young people will be able to buy rather than rent so demand for rent will decrease. This is assuming that new stock will appear in the market.

Quick!!!
Take those properties from the small landlords who spent 10′s/100′s of thousands of euros to provide for themselves, (instead of putting pressure on the state to do so)
and give them to the scroungers.

“If LL’s lose their properties and new LL’s take over who are solvent then banks will be able to offer more mortgages so young people will be able to buy rather than rent so demand for rent will decrease. This is assuming that new stock will appear in the market”????

“Ohh yes Dave”
“The honest banker wants to do that for you Dave”
“The honest banker always wants to do things for the good of the people”

I’m going to be serious here – perhaps you should seek counselling or visit a GP because surely it is not healthy for you to be so angry yet so helpless that your only outlet is an online tabloid.

You have many things to talk about, perhaps you should consider actually being proactive instead of reactive to situations. Or even better, place these things outside of your circle of influence and get on with life.

You’re loosing the plot Dave.

You are the one who keeps whining on here,

….. that the 140,000 families (conservatively 500,000 family members) who are in mortgage arrears (due to criminality in the banks)

Oh and if you refer to young people as scroungers again I will find you and kick the cr@p out of you.

…just to provide you with a cheap Repo.

You’ve been “buying” a home for the last year Davey Boy.
Time to get the wallet out.

“that 140k families should be fu*ked out just to provide you with a Repo”???

Will you stop calling yourself young,Dave ,FFS ,you’re 35 !

Banks have 1500 properties that they have repossessed ,go bloody ask them -and stop your whining and persistent moaning on these threads ;)

AIB are going to be repossessing more BTL’s ,maybe ,you should take a mortgage out with them .. They also will write off any debt that you will probably find yourself in ,down the road ;)

Who the fc*k are you?
We all know what these people have contributed.
We all know that anyone in arrears has been screwed now for at least 7 years.
The vast majority have paid what they had, when they had it for 7-10-15 years.
Why should a whining flyby night feckless fence dweller like you who might have only just set foot in the country be allowed to commandeer their home?

Sorry
That comment was at DaveMac

Wrong age Thomas. Kudos for actually contributing though.

@G

Because they played and lost the game. Their investment bet lost. This is capitalism. Why should I pay higher property costs because an investor is pocketing rent and not paying their mortgage? Best repossess, chase them down for the change and let a fresh young person buy in to Ireland.

You’ve hijacked a thread ,Dave,that was on about homelessness

Refer to initial comment, Thomas.

Dave you’ve commented on many threads here about throwing families out of their homes and onto the streets ..”Not my problem,” you said !

“Because they played and lost the game. Their investment bet lost. This is capitalism. Why should I pay higher property costs”???
Because as you’ve said yourself “that’s capitalism” Dave.

“Capitalist” Dave, want’s a personalised communist housing package tailored to his specific needs ehh??
WTF are you on about??

An investor not paying a mortgage whilst at the same time pocketing rent whilst the government enforces a ‘no repossession’ rule is not Capitalism my dear Gathering.

Capitalism is a bank given full rights to repossess an asset from someone in breach of their terms and placing it on the open market.

I’m not sure whether you can understand that. Please refer to my suggestion of counselling above.

Due to the LTV restrictions on BTL mortgages these landlords (who mostly own only one BTL) have paid huge deposits.
Plus huge interest and capital repayments, stamp duty, NPPR, LPT, service charges, maintenance costs, refurbishment costs, accountancy fees etc etc etc etc into the economy.
What have you paid Rent Boy?

”bank given full rights to repossess”???
bank rights ehh
Do you mean those criminal Cabals (who all bar none) bust themselves, sentencing the country to generations of debt slavery?
Those filthy criminals should have no rights.
Greazy vermin.

Well if they lost all this money then perhaps they were even stupider than I thought.. No reason for them to be let off though Mr Beades.

Dave,

What stopped AIB from taking two BTL’s in the first insolvency case ?

Do you blame the people / government for that ,too ?

@ f m The taxpayer is bailing out the banks and bondholders to the tune of billions of Euro. This is the welfare culture that should be ended once and for all.

Spot on Ruth.
But there are a lot of undeserving able bodied, scroungers out there milking the system.
Some of them multi generational dole lifers.

He is right there on this about one person not wanting to live in her dream house. The other place was only 15 minutes away and she was not really that homeless. She turned down accommodation and her kids were living with their father. I prefer resources to go to other people who really need it and want it. I assume plenty would move as it is only 15-20 minutes away as know what this man is talking about as read that story in the media.