‘She wouldn’t eat, she wouldn’t speak to me, she wouldn’t do anything for me’

THIS is one of the women at the centre of the House of Horrors controversy in Wexford, where a 58-year-old woman died weighing just four stone after months of starvation.

Eleanor Joel (pictured) yesterday broke her silence to claim she had done everything to try to save her mother, Evelyn.

Ms Joel, 31, denies that she prevented family members from visiting. She couldn’t explain how her mother had lost so much weight before being removed to Wexford General Hospital, where she died on January 7.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, adding: “She wouldn’t eat and she wouldn’t speak to me, she wouldn’t do anything for me.”

Ms Joel said her mother’s last meal was on Christmas Day, a tiny portion of food that a five-year-old would eat.

She claimed her mother had lost the will to live when her former partner, Alfie Joel, her ex-husband’s brother, had passed away in mid-December. It was then she took the decision to refuse food, Ms Joel said.

Ms Joel rang Joe Duffy’s Liveline programme to insist she had done everything to help her mother. She said she was up and down to her mother’s bedroom constantly. “She had orange and water and coffee and tea and I’d bring her up everything to try and make her eat and drink, I’d give her soft stuff, stuff she wouldn’t have to chew like custard and potatoes and trifle and stuff, she refused to eat it.”

When asked if the medics were physically sick when they saw her mother’s condition, Ms Joel, a mother of two children, replied: “I don’t know, I wasn’t up there with them.”

She admitted her mother was lying in her own excrement “because she wouldn’t leave her nappies on”. She didn’t know how long her mother had been without her nappies, she said: “I used to put them back on and she used to take them off again.” Ms Joel said her mother was extremely strong-willed and had not wanted her to contact social services or her doctor.

“I was very tempted, Joe, very tempted, but she said ‘no leave it alone, I don’t want help, I don’t want to go into a nursing home, I don’t want to see doctors, I don’t want to see anyone’,” she said. Ms Joel and her mother used to talk about everything until “one day I went up and she wouldn’t talk to me at all”. It was two days before New Year’s Eve.

“I did my best, Joe, and I couldn’t do any more and I got no help doing it, I did it all on my own. She’d always say no, she didn’t want help, and I felt that I was going against her wishes by getting her help.”

Ms Joel said her mother had not come downstairs since September and had not got up except to bathe. “She never came downstairs; I often asked her did she want to come down.”

Ms Joel also said she was aware her mother had septicaemia when she went to hospital, a week before she died. “I knew she didn’t want to go into a nursing home or anything.”

She rubbished reports she had fled her family home at 37, Cluain Dara estate, Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, because of anger among neighbours since details of her mother’s death emerged.

Ms Joel admitted she wasn’t on speaking terms with half her family, but said: “I wouldn’t have done anything to stop them to come and see her because they were her family too.”

This is contrary to claims by brothers and sisters of 58-year-old Evelyn Joel who said they were prevented from visiting or speaking to their sibling. They also claimed Eleanor Joel laughed over the body of her mother in the hospital and at the funeral. Ms Joel denied this yesterday, saying she was upset by her mother’s death.

Evelyn Joel lived in the house her daughter Eleanor shared with partner John Costan, 34, and their two children, Matthew, five, and Jessica, two. She lived there for about 18 months until New Year’s Eve following a call to the emergency services made by Ms Joel.

She said her children were not aware of their grandmother’s condition, only she and her partner knew. Neither did she realise the seriousness of the situation until two days before New Year’s Eve. Ms Joel said her mother’s last word to her was “No” when she asked if she should call an ambulance. Ms Joel added she intended to stay at her home, contrary to reports that she and her family had moved out.