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TENANTS OF TATHONY House in Dublin 8 have held another demonstration outside the building in protest of their impending eviction.
The 34 households were served eviction notices last October when the landlord decided to sell, but the remaining 15 households say they have “no intention” of leaving on the 2 June deadline.
Speaking to TheJournal ahead of the demonstration, tenants’ organiser James O’Toole said that there has been a “profound change” in the attitudes of the building’s tenants since the eviction ban was lifted.
He says people were “a bit nervous” at first, “but now everybody that’s left is really determined to challenge it because they realise they have no other option”.
“Myself and my wife were kind of leading the charge in terms of the campaign, but now we very much have all the tenants on the same page,” O’Toole said.
Some of those who moved out of the building have had to relocate to places like Meath and Dundalk as they were unable to find a home in Dublin.
Remaining tenants include a lone parent and healthcare worker, as well as a man receiving ongoing treatment for cancer nearby.
“We’re protesting to basically indicate to the landlord: Look, we can get 150, 200 people outside this block, so do everything legally,” O’Toole said.
Also in attendance today will be artist Spicebag who recently received attention for his reworking of a 1850 painting depicting a Famine-era eviction. Spicebag’s image shows present-day gardaí as facilitators in the eviction.
According to O’Toole, the piece was “spot on”.
“If your landlord goes through all the legal means … someone turns up at your door with a piece of paper and says ‘get out’, you’re off into homelessness.
“You say, ‘I don’t want to leave and I don’t want to go into homelessness’, then in that situation, [Spicebag’s] painting will come true and it will come true for a lot of families.”
The Tyrrelstown Amendment to the Residential Tenancies Act 2016 prevents landlords or property owners from evicting 10 or more units of their property, unless it would cause “undue hardship” financially by allowing the tenants to stay.
The building’s owner has availed of the hardship clause. The tenants have made a case to the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) that the eviction is illegal, claiming that the landlord “hasn’t shown us any proof that he’s in hardship”.
The fear among Tathony House tenants is that, even if the RTB rule that the eviction was illegal, the landlord will issue new eviction notices in batches of less than 10 to get around the Tyrrelstown Amendment.
O’Toole added: “The shameful thing really is that in normal circumstances, people would have somewhere to go, but there’s no public housing … and the private rental market, as we all know, is chaotic.”
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The government simply should have seperate laws for corporate landlords like in this situation versus independent landlords who are in a completely different situation and who absolutely should not be compared.
An individual landlord selling a single property is completely different to a corporate landlord selling an entire block of flats and evicting everyone all at once. They are two completely different kettles of fish, yet almost everyone on here will mix the two together as though they are exactly the same thing.
Independent landlords need a right to use their property as they see fit whilst respecting notice periods and existing tenant rights, just like in every other European country (I live in continental Europe and know).
However, different rules should apply if a company owns an entire appartment block. I can’t understand why everything is always lumped in together in the rage machine that is today’s world. Can common sense please apply.
@Steve: Exactly
@Steve:
A landlord is what a landlord does; have other people buy them free houses.
@Steve: great comment so true
@Steve: And what about a private landlord with maybe 4 or 5 apartments. Which group does he or she go into??
@9QRixo8H: Very True!
@Chris Gaffney: Small private landlord. A Corporate landlord pays corporate taxes which are f’all.
I was a landlord but I needed the house for returning family so of course different rules should apply for single Landlords .
Young fit & able James O’Toole has a part-time job and demands Dublin 8 location while full-time workers are commuting in from Louth, Meath, Kildare, Wicklow and areas of Dublin. He talks about being removed from the housing list for earning too much so now he is part-time.
O’Tooles wife demands that Dublin City Corporation buy the property and rent to the existing tenants. Maybe that’s right or maybe that is wrong. There are students who work more hours than James O’Toole. Is he too good to commute?
@Michael McLoughlin: it’s easy to fall into this thinking but there are requirements in big cities for low paid workers. Who is going to work cleaning or stocking shelves in Dublin City if it’s unaffordable for those low paid workers to live? These are the working poor who need government support to provide them with housing. They are doing the right thing but the conditions around them are pushing them into poverty. If they move down the country n commute yes their rent reduces but now they have to run a car n spend 3 hours a day in the car. Which is probably even worse way to live.
We are at full employment and we are importing people are a very quick rate at the moment add to the housing problem. Our economy is running too hot to match our ability to build the infrastructure to cope.
I think the corporate landlords have being sorting out the Government’s housing headache for years. They bought the land , they got the builders , they got the job done. As we all know , if you have someone sorting out a problem for you, you bury your head and leave them to it. This day was always going to come. It’s not right , it’s not nice but it’s not illegal. The housing crisis in Ireland is not the landlords , be they private or corporate , fault. Governments past and present are using the emotions and anger of tenants against landlords to cover their own failings for this crisis. So by all means protest against the corporate landlords but let’s equally if not louder protest against the government.
1yr notice is loads of time to find somewhere to live not 8months
@Liam Mc Meel: You can’t be serious. On top of having cancer treatment? When there are no affordable places to rent? If you can’t help the people involved, there’s no point in preaching to people in an impossible situation who would love to have a less stressful option.
@Liam Mc Meel: It took me 18 months + the time given of 6 months to find a place. 2 years.
I was homeless i wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
This utter clown O’toole is a pbp extreme leftist who advocates for open borders and mass immigration and then refuses to acknowledge the self evident link between it and the housing/ rental crisis.He,as an individual,deserves the consequences of his own warped ideology.
Good luck to the group. The battle against Corporate Landlords is only beginning. No one should be allowed to profit from basic human needs.
@TheQueenofHibernia: Food is a basic human need, should farmers have to sell their product for cost price? How would they and their families survive?
@TheQueenofHibernia: So no more private rentals. Good luck with that one!!
Ffg have created the idea that we the citizens have no power .the truth is a little bit more complicated, there are several way to remove rot,
After June 2, call them squatters.
@Yvon Queguiner: not if they still pay rent
‘… relocate to counties such as Meath or Dundalk’. Where’s County Dundalk?
@Earth Traveller: It’s a little over 30Km north of county Drogheda
What people fail to realise is that landlords cannot evict tenants, nor can the RTB.
A landlord can issue a notice of termination, and the rtb can issue a determination order
Only bailiffs appointed by a District Court can enforce an order of eviction.
If these tenants refuse to comply with the landlords Notice to Quit, then it’s about 2 years before a DC can make an eviction order.
@Paul: This is why there is so little investment in rental properties compared to other countries.
Your investment is subject to abuse by tenants and red tape by the legal system.
Counties like meath and dundalk!!lazy typo’s again be better journal writers!
Spicebag!!! Ballbag is more appropriate.
The coporatisation of property was invited here by Fine Gael and Michael Noonan. The corporates pay no tax on their profits unlike small single property landlords and they hold the market to ransome with bulk lettings. It is time we cap the number of properties these corporates can own and stop the downward spiral back to the absentee landlords of the 19th century. Did we give the Brits the boot one hundred years ago just so the Canadian /American vulture funds can own our property and extort our citizens today ??
Denis Ryan. No. Farmers ought to be able to make a living from the sale of from products. What do you say about supermarkets that have made enormous profits from distributing and marketing the produce of farmers?
@TheQueenofHibernia: Ah pet, don’t you know how to post on the same thread. Stop moving the goalposts, you said that housing was a human right and shouldn’t be profited off. I respond with food as a base level of human need and the need for profit so that food will be produced. Why move the subject onto supermarkets.
A young, non European, non Irish asylum seeker who took the Irish Govt. because he was denied access to accommodation, food, care won his case in an Irish Court this week. So why are Irish Citizens not entitled to the same protections and Rights laid down by the E.U. Charter..
The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union brings together the most important personal freedoms and rights enjoyed by citizens of the EU into one legally binding document. The Charter was declared in 2000, and came into force in December 2009 along with the Treaty of Lisbon.
Between 1936, 1975 when Ireland was cash strapped, the State was able to BUILD huge swathes of Affordable Public Housing for workers. That all changed with the Celtic Tiger “Tenant Farming” culture whereby everyone in Ireland was told to acquire a portfolio of “starter units” as a pension, paid for by the (rack) rent of their tenants. Basically the same Absentee landlord System operated by the British for 753 years.
Remarkably, Irish people taught in school about the Famine, tenant slavery, eviction, emigration of our ancestors took to this system like coffin ships to water.
The core of the deliberstely orchestrated “housing problem” is that there are no LEGISLATED RIGHTS to housing FOR ALL on the Irish Statute books. In 2009 FF scrapped, wiped the one and only Tenant Right from the Constitution because it didn’t suit landlords and developers. That was the 35 year Long Term Equity Lease available through the courts to tenants of 20 years duration.
Only those who OWN Land and Property have RIGHTS to their home under Fine Gael’s 1949 Land and Property Act. This does not apply to about four fifths of the population who are not property owners, but live in dwellings owned by others. How is this democracy?
@Paul Newsome: Have you not noticed that there are a million more people living in Ireland since 2009.
There would be no accommodation crisis if that million didn’t come here..
The RTB can and does nothing to remove overholding tenants.
I know this through my own experience where my overholding tenant just simply refused to comply with their determination order.
Only a Court ordered eviction can remove tenants behaving illegally.
Which is why no one want to be a landlord any more.
The left is reaping what it has sowed!
I look forward to seeing what the RTB do to assist the landlord get the property back.
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