Elderly social-housing tenants living in century-old homes associated with Cork\u2019s old Fever Hospital claim they have been \u201cabandoned\u201d by the city council in unsuitable accommodation high up in the northside.<\/p>\n
The oldest of the 128 red-brick terraced houses of Roche\u2019s Buildings date back to 1879, while the rest were built in 1905, the same year as the neighbouring 48 houses in Sutton\u2019s Buildings.<\/p>\n
They originally served as accommodation for workers in Victoria Barracks, Murphy\u2019s Brewery, and the Fever Hospital.<\/p>\n
The majority of social-housing tenants in the buildings are elderly, and several told The Echo they feel they have been \u201cabandoned\u201d by the council, receiving what they claim are only sporadic responses to maintenance requests.<\/p>\n
Damp<\/p>\n
They claim their homes are prone to damp and, because of their outdated design, are not always adequate to their needs.<\/p>\n
Kevin O\u2019Leary is 66 and has lived there for 15 years. He says he is one of \u201cthe lucky ones\u201d, as he is mobile and in relatively good health.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat gets to me is that so many of the people they put up here are old people, who can barely walk. They\u2019re put into a house where the stairs are very narrow and high. A lot of people don\u2019t even go upstairs to bed; they sleep down in an armchair in their front room,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cSome people have rotten window frames and water flowing down their walls, and it\u2019s very hard to get a response from the council when you ask for help.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe council says that some of the problem is caused by tenants not clearing their chutes and downpipes. These are people who can\u2019t climb the stairs, let alone a ladder.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cI would fear for a lot of the more elderly people up here. We\u2019re like the land that time forgot up here.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s people up here who have no one to rely on. We have two fellas working here in the community centre, Paul [O\u2019Leary, no relation] and Pat. They give out Penny Dinners every day; they do be running around to people; they\u2019re very good. But if it wasn\u2019t for them, some people would have no one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rotten<\/p>\n
Paul O\u2019Leary is 63 and has lived in Roche\u2019s Buildings for eight years and, as Kevin said, is working in the resource centre.<\/p>\n
Paul said: \u201cI\u2019m waiting two years for a new door. The door I have is rotten. I think it\u2019s an original door, going back a hundred years. Since I\u2019ve been below there, left and right of me have become vacant, and they both got new doors. As far as I can see, the only way to get a new door is to die.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maggie Blyth is 64, and she regularly makes representations on behalf of neighbours who are living in damp, unsuitable accommodation and are not computer-literate.<\/p>\n
\u201cI find the council next to impossible to get a response from, and when they do reply it\u2019s to say they can\u2019t respond to me, that they can only talk to the tenants,\u201d she says. \u201cA lot of these people aren\u2019t online, so how are they supposed to get in touch with the council?\u201d<\/p>\n
Kevin O\u2019Leary asks: \u201cWhy did the council send all these elderly people up to live on the top of a mountain, in houses that are damp and half-falling down, where there\u2019s hardly any buses, and forget about them?\u201d Residents say the service operated by the 209 bus route, which connects the area to the city centre on a thrice-daily basis, only offers them transport on a mid-morning, lunchtime, and mid-afternoon basis.\n <\/p>\n
This means, they say, they are \u201cstranded\u201d if they require transport outside of those times, or else have to depend upon taxis, while they are similarly dependent on taxis for routes not covered by the 209.<\/p>\n
According to Paul O\u2019Leary, many of the residents are pensioners who need to get to the post office in Blackpool.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cYou\u2019re talking a tenner each way, and if they want to visit the hospital, that\u2019s \u20ac20 each way. That\u2019s completely out of their budget.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
Bus \u00c9ireann is contracted to operate the 209 route by the National Transport Authority. A spokesperson for Bus \u00c9ireann said that under the BusConnects programme, the route will be replaced by one that will deliver \u201ca significant increase in service levels in this area, with significant enhancement to frequency across all days of the week\u201d.<\/p>\n
Noel O\u2019Flynn is a former Fianna F\u00e1il TD and is currently a city councillor in the north-eastern ward.<\/p>\n
He began his political career in 1991, successfully seeking election to then Cork Corporation as a Fianna F\u00e1il candidate.<\/p>\n
He still has a piece of election literature from then, featuring a photograph of an outside toilet at Roche\u2019s Buildings, captioned: \u201cIs this how we treat our senior citizens?\u201d.<\/p>\n
No longer fit for purpose\u00a0<\/p>\n
He says Roche\u2019s Buildings and Sutton\u2019s Buildings are \u201cno longer fit for purpose\u201d and need to be brought up to a suitable standard.<\/p>\n
He says he has received a favourable response to representations he has made to the council on behalf of tenants.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m very pleased with the answer from the director of housing, who has responded, the other night at our council meeting, saying: \u2018Yes, work must be done, we\u2019re going to start some works immediately, replacing chutes and ensuring that the roofs and velux windows are repaired or replaced\u2019,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe insulation is a bigger job, and may involve moving people out of their homes for a short period and moving them back in again, or it may involve moving them into the ones that have been brought up to some form of standard, which is the BER [Building Energy Rating] 2.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is vital, he adds, that \u201cpeople in their twilight years\u201d have somewhere decent to live \u201cfree from cold and dampness\u201d.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Cork City Council said it operates a full response maintenance service to Roches and Suttons Buildings.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cA programme has begun to address issues around rainwater protection in Roches Buildings, dealing initially with guttering and down pipes. Any outstanding issues around roof and Velux leaks will also be addressed as part of this programme,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
\u201cA similar programme will be progressed for Suttons Buildings in early 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cRequests for window and door replacements are assessed on a case-by-case basis.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elderly social-housing tenants living in century-old homes associated with Cork\u2019s old Fever Hospital claim they have been \u201cabandoned\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256633,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,51415,79,6037,61,60],"class_list":["post-256632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-cork-housing","tag-cork-news","tag-cork-city-council","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}