Irish Examiner View: Rental conditions absolutely unacceptable

Alina Maranescu who is pregnant with twins and lives with her son standing in the kitchen of her flat on Church Street, Shandon, Cork. Picture Dan Linehan

Yesterday, Liz Dunphy of this newspaper reported the story of a pregnant single mother and her little boy living in terrible conditions in a flat in Cork.

Terrible is an understatement, if anything. 

A hole in the ceiling of the flat allowed human excrement and urine to pass through into her kitchen from the flat upstairs. The ceiling in her bathroom collapsed and she was afraid the same would happen in the kitchen, given there was a hole in that ceiling already. Her boy’s school had contacted Tusla and the gardaí about their living conditions.

In the flurry of political point-scoring about the eviction ban — on-the-one-hand this, keeping-landlords-in-the-market that — this report was an eye-opening expose of the reality of the rental market. 

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It beggars belief that anyone could stand over the accommodation this woman and her child were living in and deem it fit for human habitation, never mind take money from them for it.

The main bathroom in the flat where Alina Maranescu lives with her son. Picture: Dan Linehan

The defence most likely to be offered in such cases is that not all landlords are like this; but it is completely unacceptable that any of them are like this.

Describing the predicament of this woman and her son as exploitation is a gross understatement — if animals were kept in an enclosure with faeces and urine dripping into it, there would be an outcry, and rightly so. Yet this woman and her son had to endure these conditions and pay for the privilege.

These premises, horrific though they are, also have a statistical significance.

Because this woman and her son are living there, they cannot be classified as homeless, though ‘home’ is the most inappropriate description of their quarters one could imagine.

A letter from the little boy’s school described him as living in conditions which would make one’s “blood run cold”, though that may not be the temperature which leaps to mind. The notion that someone is profiting from the misery of others in this way should surely make the blood boil with anger.