A special needs assistant living in a Dublin City Council flat complex has described a “nightmare” she is experiencing with sewage coming up through her toilet and into her home.
Lynsey McGrath (42), who lives on the ground floor of Mercer House in Dublin 2, says the issue first arose four years ago and is now occurring every six to eight weeks.
McGrath lives in the three-bedroom flat with her husband, who works as a plumber, and their four children aged 15, 13, 10 and three.
She says the problem appears to be caused by a blocked stack pipe, located on the external wall of the flat complex, which carries wastewater out to the underground sewer system.
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“When it’s blocked, every time someone flushes in the flats above me, the toilet overflows in my house. You’re talking poo, tissue and everything else,” she says.
“My husband has to break the cap off the pipe outside to let it out, because otherwise it’s coming up through our toilet and into our house. You’d rather have it outside than inside.”
McGrath says she notifies the council each time it happens, and council workers then flush the pipes and put the cap back on. The issue has occurred about eight times since January 2025, she says, with the latest incident last February. “There is obviously a problem,” she adds.
“Different people come out and they say: ‘We need to get the camera down the pipe to look,’ but that never happens. They never actually send someone out to do it. They just flush the pipe and basically wait for it to happen again. The problem is not actually getting fixed,” she says.
When the toilet floods again, she says, she has to ask her neighbours not to flush their toilets.
“You can’t be asking people not to flush their toilet. Then I can’t use the toilet and I have to go into the neighbours, which is mental.”
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McGrath, who has lived in the flat since she was seven and pays €110 rent per week to the council, says it is also “riddled” with damp and mould. She was diagnosed with asthma aged 33, and says her condition is “really bad at the moment”.
“There was always a problem with rising dampness for as far as I can remember,” she says. “I’ve had the place painted twice since Christmas and you can see the black comes back almost automatically.”
She says kitchen cupboard items such as salt and stock cubes are often damp.
“My little one has a material bed and the mould set into the back of her bed. It’s a nightmare. My little fella put his coat in the wardrobe when they broke up for the Christmas break and when he took it back out when they were going back to school it was full of mould. He couldn’t wear it.”
McGrath always maintained she would “never” move out of the complex but, because of the sewage and mould problems, she says “we would at this stage”. They are on the council’s transfer list.
Mercer House, built in the 1930s and designed by renowned city architect Herbert Simms, is a protected structure.
Dublin City Council said it continues to liaise with Uisce Éireann on “an issue with the sewer lines in the public road”.
