Mary says she registered a complaint when she realised what was going on, but now thinks it doesn’t matter; she’s out of there and all her efforts now are focused on trying to get her family out of a hotel room and into a home. Every day she trawls the ads online looking for a property that falls within her budget of close to €2,000 a month. That’s €500 a week for two bedrooms for her and her two children. She says she can’t even get viewings, and that although landlords and agents are prohibited from profiling prospective tenants in receipt of social welfare payments, somehow they have ways of finding out. She says that initially many estate agents are enthusiastic, but the vast majority never call her back for a viewing.
She became so desperate that she decided to post the above ad. It had been online for four weeks when I phoned her. Unfortunately, she’s had no serious offers, except for one person who has put their house up for sale and said she could rent it until the sale went through. ‘To be honest, I put the ad up and forgot all about it until you rang,’ she says. ‘Because I qualify for a HAP payment, I think they just filter me out.’
Her allowance comes to €1,912 a month and she is prepared to pay €100–200 a month in cash on top of that, even though she’s not working and is in full-time education. She knows of many families in her situation who are handing over illegal cash payments up front to secure houses, even though they are on very limited incomes. Such is the competition for housing at present that she cannot get emergency accommodation on the south side of the city, even though that’s where her children go to school and all her family live. She’s also studying for a Masters degree in law on the south side.
Not only is she on a waiting list for social housing, as are tens of thousands of others, but she now finds herself on a waiting list for ‘family hub’ emergency accommodation. This is a waiting list to get on a waiting list for a home. The hotel she is in at present has a separate entrance for homeless families and individuals, on the side away from the regular entrance which paying guests use. While there is a kitchen available to families and a small playroom, she says this has to be shared with homeless families and individuals on six floors. She estimates that there are up to 70 homeless people in this part of the hotel.
While she’s there, she keeps to herself. She doesn’t like her children playing in the communal areas or cooking with other families. Partly this is out of shame and embarrassment, but she’s also very protective of her children and doesn’t want their situation to become normalised through engaging with others. As a result, it has been almost six months since she cooked her children a meal. This makes her feel inadequate as a parent and serves as a daily reminder that she’s not providing for her children as she feels she should be. I tell her the opposite is in fact the case, that she is clearly going to extraordinary lengths to do what she can for her children. Deep down she knows this, but the disruption of being homeless is clearly impacting on her sense of wellbeing.
By 7.45 a.m. we arrive at her parents’ house, where she and her kids will finally have breakfast, nearly two hours after they’d all woken up in their cramped room. The support of her family has kept her sane, she tells me, and allows her to cling to some semblance of normal life. She’s not hopeful that she will get a council home any time soon, given that she’s been five years on the waiting list. Others she knows have spent up to 15 years waiting.
Once she and the children have had breakfast, her second commute from her parents’ house to the school and crèche begins. This is a much shorter journey and everyone is in better form and more alert when I join them along the way.
Just after 9 a.m., once she has kissed her elder child goodbye at the school gate, we sit in her car. When I ask about the impact of living in a hotel on her kids, she becomes emotional. We sit for a few minutes while she dabs at the tears on her cheeks with a Starbucks napkin. ‘It’s had a huge impact,’ she says. ‘I’m getting my son psychologically assessed because he is not coping well at all. Aside from the upheaval of this, I think he may have Asperger’s. He has an appointment tomorrow. I suppose this does hit me hard because, would you believe it, I went through the same thing myself with my parents. We were homeless for four years when I was younger.’
The tragedy of inter-generational homelessness for this family underlines how poorly housing needs have been addressed since the 1980s and how cyclical our housing problems have become. There’s almost a fatalism about it. The same fatalism often struck me when, for example, former Mountjoy Governor John Lonergan commented that he knew the parents and grandparents of prisoners in his care from their time in jail. Is it a stretch to say that these days some social welfare and housing officers are experiencing the same cycle, having dealt with and tried to house the parents of the young mothers and fathers who are trying to access their services today?
‘We were a family who had come back from the UK and when I was a child, from the ages of nine to 12, I was homeless,’ Mary explains. ‘This for me is like history repeating. I do think I absorbed a lot of stress when I was younger, and this time around I find it harder because it is impacting on my own kids and I know how it will leave a lasting impression. They should have their own room, maybe a garden, and the security of knowing where they will be next week. They don’t have that and I feel huge guilt because of it.’
She and her children found themselves in a hotel after her relationship with the father of the children broke down. Initially, she moved back in with her parents, but there were 11 people living in a three-bedroomed terraced house and pretty soon tensions began to rise. She says she had to leave there before things got out of hand, and that because she left voluntarily and declared herself homeless, she feels she’s not a priority for the council. That’s why many question the official homeless figures. There is a whole community of hidden homeless, squeezed into box rooms in their parents’ mid-terraced, three-bed homes, or couch-surfing with friends or moving between numerous properties. The most public manifestations of homelessness that we see – usually rough sleepers – are just the tip of the iceberg.
Mary’s ultimate plan is to become a solicitor, but the pressure of studying full-time, balancing parenthood and not having a home is clearly having a negative impact on her studies. It’s a vicious circle, she says, and she feels that the system is stacked against someone like her moving into employment and away from dependence on social welfare and housing assistance payments.
The other factors she has to cope with are unnecessarily long days. Often, she doesn’t get home with the kids until 7 p.m. By this time, they’ll have fallen asleep in the car en route, and she has to wake them to walk the 100 or so metres from the car park, through the side entrance and upstairs to their room. They then go straight to bed. There’s no chance to unwind or relax or have quality family time.
The rules in the hotel mean that she’s not allowed any guests who are not approved in advance. Generally, families are also not permitted in each other’s rooms. She’s not allowed to walk around the corridors in pyjamas, and the children are often prevented from playing in corridors or play areas. The people she shares the floor with come from all kinds of backgrounds and range in age from teenage single mothers to elderly single men and women. In her class at university only one other person knows about her personal circumstances. She is afraid too that the father of her children will find out she is homeless and blame her for not being a good enough mother. I try to reassure her that any fair-minded person would say that she is doing all she can in very trying circumstances. It’s not her fault that she is one of 10,000 homeless people let down by society’s failure to invest in adequate numbers of social and affordable homes.
One of the hardest things for Mary is that she has been given no indication of when she will have a front-door key. She simply wants a place to call her own, and where her children can experience a normal childhood. Hope is a scarce commodity when you’re living in a hotel room hours away from all support. The
situation gets to her at times, but because every day is such a struggle, she tries not to overthink but to live in the now, however difficult that may be. She will leave the ad up for another few weeks, but doesn’t have much faith that anyone will respond positively.
‘I’m just a statistic,’ she tells me, before departing for her college class. ‘I try not to think about the future as it can be overwhelming, so I just try to take one day at a time and focus on other things. It’s the only way I know how to get through it.’
Making Study Pay
Leaving Cert notes – 590 points! I achieved 590 points in my Leaving Certificate in 2016. I am selling my notes that I compiled to help me achieve these top grades of A1. The price of €20 per subject is a small price to pay as one grind is €35 avg. covering a chapter whereas these notes cover the entire course. Please text me with any queries you may have, also please leave a contact number if emailing me so I can reply. DoneDeal, January 2019
Niamh McGrath is one of those children your mother or father compared you to unfavourably as a child when you weren’t applying yourself fully. With a wagging finger and deliberately enuciating each word as they barged into your room early on a Sunday morning, they might have said: ‘You don’t see Niamh McGrath out all hours of the day or night a month before her Leaving Cert do you?’ or ‘Do you think Niamh McGrath is at home pestering her parents to be allowed go to a rap concert?’ You get the idea. You grew up resenting the Niamh McGraths of this world, not because of anything personal, but because of how others held them up as shining examples of golden children, to be cited in instances when you disappointed a grown-up.
Sitting across from me in the foyer of the Kingsley Hotel is a confident second-year pharmacy student at University College Cork, who readily admits that for her, school and studying came naturally and was something she embraced wholeheartedly. ‘I wasn’t that good at sport,’ Niamh tells me, between mouthfuls of sparkling water, ‘so school for me was something I was natural at and I loved school and everything about it.’
Niamh’s mother works as an accounts clerk and her father is an engineer, and looking back, she says that both pushed her academically. They supported her love of science and maths from a young age. ‘If I ever struggled with science my dad would always guide me,’ she says. ‘He would have stressed the importance of education. We’d get killed if we had bad grades!’
Anyone who has sat the examination knows about the intensity of the Leaving Cert year and the huge pressure and stress it places on students. Even for a natural student like Niamh, it was an attritional experience in which every hour she had was accounted for and studying became her sole focus. She stopped playing camogie in her final year so she could squeeze every last minute out of her timetable and downtime to study. She told herself it was just one year and that the 100 per cent commitment and focus would be worth it.
Her typical weekly schedule involved after-school study from Monday to Thursday from 4–6 p.m. This was when she got her homework done. She then went home, had some dinner and was back at her desk at 7 p.m. and studied until 10 or 11 p.m. on a normal night. In the weeks immediately before the Leaving Cert, this study session could stretch into the small hours of the morning, while on Saturdays she attended supervised study for most of the day.
Coupled with this, Niamh had weekly private grinds in Irish oral work. She was lucky that her next-door neighbour was a retired Irish teacher and an advocate of the language and working with him gave her a shot at a high grade. From an early stage in secondary school she’d had her sights set on pharmacy. For this she needed just short of 500 points, or at least three A1s and a few high B1s or A2s. In the end, she got four A1s, including one in honours maths. When she compares her extraordinary results with those of her contemporaries, her success in science subjects and maths bucked the trend of the grades achieved by other girls she knew at the time. She feels this is the result of a lack of confidence in tackling the subjects, due in part to negative social conditioning, which is belatedly being challenged.
‘You do still get that narrative that women will go towards what I might call the more feminine careers, such as teaching and nursing,’ she says. ‘And the current statistics will show that boys are better at more maths- and science-type subjects, while girls would tend to be more natural at English and languages. That’s the general experience anyway.’
I was surprised, in an era where gender equality is positively asserted and every family probably has two parents working, to hear Niamh tell me that certain careers are still being suggested predominantly to one gender over the other. ‘I remember a big push for nursing in school for all the girls, and definitely I don’t remember boys being encouraged to do nursing to the same extent,’ she explains. ‘Hopefully, though, that’s changing.’
When she totted up all her grades, Niamh got 590 points in her Leaving Cert so had a bit to spare to get on to her course. The final year when she put in long hours and late nights paid off, but rather than being glad it’s all over, she finds university life very different in comparison. She really liked school, she liked getting homework and she liked the assistance of and interaction with teachers along the way.
‘I enjoyed the help of teachers but now in university, you could never bother to turn up if you didn’t want to. No one would say anything. It’s all down to yourself. I moved out of home, and am getting used to having everything on my shoulders.’
Pharmacy is one of the toughest courses she could have chosen. It involves very long hours, so much so that she finds in the evenings she has little energy to study. It’s the kind of course where students need 100 per cent attention and focus in lectures to be able to process the sheer volume of information given to them on a daily basis. It’s made all the harder, she feels, because despite her success in the Leaving Cert, she doesn’t believe it adequately prepared her for university study.
‘It was all about learning stuff off and regurgitating it,’ she explains. ‘In the first year in college you’re still in that mindset, thinking that what you study is what will come up in exams. But it’s totally different and they are likely to throw anything at you. The only point of the Leaving Cert really is to motivate students to want something and work hard for it. I know parents won’t thank me for this but a lot of what you learn is never used again and the main skills you get are stamina. It doesn’t prepare you at all for the next phase of life though.’
Niamh found other ways to make her Leaving Cert results pay dividends. A few years ago, she remembers seeing an interview with a student who got seven A1s. He had received some of the highest results in the country and he said in the interview that he planned to sell copies of his study notes online. She remembers thinking it would be great to get her hands on the notes; that they might just give her an edge. She became obsessive about notes during her Leaving Cert preparation, and assembled carefully catalogued folders for each subject.
‘I remember after the Leaving Cert, thinking it was such a shame all the work I had put into these will be just locked away. And then I began to wonder would someone be willing to pay for my notes given all the effort I had put in?’
And so Niamh put her study notes for four of her subjects – the ones she got A1s in – up on DoneDeal, charging €20 for each subject. She says this compares to about €35, which someone is likely to pay for a private grind.
When I meet her, it’s been two years since the ad has been up and initially, she tells me, she was completely taken aback by the response. ‘I expected a few calls at the time, but was not prepared for the volume of interest,’ she says. ‘It blew up. And every year since, especially around the time of the mocks or the Leaving Cert itself, I make dozens of sales. I am making a steady €7–800 a year from it and I have the notes in email form now so I just forward a copy each time. It’s a nice little earner coming up to Christmas or Rag Week for me.’
Mostly, Niamh doesn’t have to deal with
follow-up queries, and only a handful of buyers have demanded she send the notes as hard copy. She stopped doing this as it was costing her too much to produce and to post them.
The buyers all seemed satisfied with what they got. Take her Irish notes, for example; she will send complete essays which can be learned off by heart or tailored to fit topics. All her notes go beyond what a student would get in the classroom from their teacher and she has curated various courses and approaches which she has used. The notes are such a hit that several teachers have also bought them from her! One of them was writing a maths book and asked if he could incorporate some of her material, while she’s also had panicked calls from parents doing everything they can to get their young Jimmy or Mary over the line with weeks or days to go.
Niamh doesn’t see herself leaving Ireland after her degree is complete. She’s too much of a home bird. If she was Minister for Education for a day, she would alter the curriculum to make subjects more relevant to potential careers. ‘I think subjects should be more relevant to industry. I also think that career guidance needs an overhaul and that’s no reflection on any of the wonderful career guidance teachers I had. In general, it needs to be less gender specific. One of the girls I live with qualified as a nurse, and she hates nursing but it was what was strongly encouraged for her. She would have been a brilliant engineer, for example.’
The Personals Page 17