'People are dying': Urgent appeal to move Cork residents from 'damp, rat-infested' apartments

Cork City councillor Albert Deasy said it was 'inhumane' to leave people in these homes 

Concrete crumbled off this windowsill on a property in Cork City Council's portfolio. Picture: Noel

An appeal to urgently move tenants living in “rat-infested, appalling conditions” in flats “for the sake of basic decency and public health” was made at Cork City Council.

Allowing people to live in a number of flats in Togher on the south side of the city is inhumane, councillor Albert Deasy told the council. 

Some residents are “extremely ill”, with a number of people there suffering with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a serious respiratory condition that can be exasperated in damp, cold conditions.

“They didn’t cause the problem, and it’s inhuman to leave people living in these appalling conditions,” Mr Deasy said. "People there are dying."

Rats are entering the homes through pipes due to collapsed underground sewers and wastewater pipes, he said.

It is a “very poor reflection” of Cork City Council that people are still in these “cold, damp, dangerous” conditions, he added.

Mr Deasy asked Cork City Council CEO Valerie O’Sullivan to go and meet the people living there, “and see the conditions first hand”.

“Once you see it, you can’t unsee it,” he said.

Cork City Council’s service delivery plan 2026 promises high-standard maintenance and regeneration for the city’s social housing stock.

“Yet, it glaringly contains no specific objective, timeline, or funding line for one of the most pressing and massive problems in Cork City right now, the appalling, deteriorating flat complexes in Togher,” Mr Deasy said.

Flat complexes in urgent need of work include homes in the Cherry Tree Rd, Hazel Rd, Sycamore Place, Maple Place Clashduv Rd, and Togher Rd areas, he said.

He asked that the plan be reconsidered to include regeneration plans for the Togher flat complexes.

If this could not be done, he requested that residents living in unsafe and unhealthy homes there to be urgently moved to safer living environments.

Some of the homes are structurally unsound, with a chunk of masonry falling on one resident recently.

One man in the flats with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has two dehumidifiers on constantly.

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Residents cannot paint their homes because the walls are black with mould again in weeks due to the damp, Mr Deasy told the Irish Examiner.

Ms O’Sullivan said that a special meeting on the flat complexes has been arranged.

“Nobody knows the condition of those places better than the tenants and ourselves in the council,” Ms O’Sullivan said.

Cork City Council has “a huge housing stock” and much of it is ageing with funding needed to refurbish it “not coming quickly enough”, she said.

However, the council will focus on refurbishing these flats, she said.