Where houses cost less than cars

Last week's tragic arson attack generated plenty of headlines and coverage, but the problems will take more than outrage to solve, writes Kathy Sheridan in Limerick

This week, a woman from Pineview Gardens stood in her immaculate house, looking out at the scorch marks on the street where two small children almost died - and are certainly scarred for life - when their mother's car was set ablaze last Sunday.

While spittle-flecked broadcasters and politicians fulminated about "animals", "thugs" and "savages", and called for the army to march on Moyross, the woman - let's call her Jean - looked out at the ruins of her life. Twenty years ago, Jean and her husband proudly bought into the owner-tenant scheme, run by the corporation. In the meantime, they reared four fine children in this little cul de sac and built a memory bank of summer nights outside, chatting with "lovely neighbours" into the early hours while their children ran around, safe and carefree.

Her neighbour nods in agreement. "Seven years ago, people told me I must have had the four leaf clover to land a house here. It really felt like that."

In four years time, Jean will finally own the house. But against every dictum of boom-town Ireland, she might as well have splashed the money on cars or drink or holidays. What was once a place to aspire to is now a by-word for degradation. That home ownership is her trap. She wants to get out but who is going to buy this house?

"I might get €20,000 for it. Who'd want to move out here now?"

People up here have learned not to put up For Sale signs. They attract the kind of "buyer" who systematically makes your life "so miserable" that you end up taking a fraction of the asking price. Michael Murray, the Limerick city state solicitor, has spoken of a Limerick resident whose house was valued at €80,000. When he decided to sell, a criminal gang offered him €16,000, which he refused, and he was then burnt out. He ended up homeless. It is rumoured that certain families target whole rows of houses in this fashion.

Search the property websites in property-mad Ireland for a Moyross home. Daft has one, a three-bed terraced house at €75,000. No address is given. The only photograph is an interior shot. MyHome has none.

The phenomenon is not confined to Pineview. A house across the city famously went for €10,000, according to Jean. Another went for €4,000-5,000, although it had no doors or windows.

Changing Ireland, a national newsletter of the community development programme, based in Moyross, carried pictures a few months ago of a snug two-bed Limerick house, "fully alarmed with enclosed garage, double glazed windows, with dual oil/fire heating . . . ", beside another of a "traditional farmhouse", a derelict shack near Killarney, Co Kerry. The snug house was for sale at €30,000; the shack for €140,000.

Allen Meagher, editor of the newsletter, says that hundreds of families in Limerick are stuck in good quality houses that are regularly put up for sale for no more than €30,000, the price of a family car. There are confirmed reports of residents who have become so frustrated that they have walked away from their homes.

The irony is that Moyross has fine, well-resourced schools; a new €2.5 million public library is on the way; there's a new shopping centre at the entrance; a third-level college across the wall (a very high wall, tellingly); Thomond Park is across another; the pipe band and boxing club are models of their kind; and the city centre is a 20-minute walk away. Moyross, you might think, is on the up.

But employed, productive young people looking for ways to buy into the estate where they were reared are being refused mortgages. Deirdre O'Driscoll asked her bank for a €55,000 mortgage to buy a house in Moyross. "They were willing to give a €153,000 loan for a house anywhere else." Their final advice was to go to the corporation to get social housing.

The effect is clear and dismal. "Someone like Deirdre, a young woman in secure, full-time State employment and her guy, who also has a job, have to purchase off the estate. And they will be replaced by families coming in from the lower end of the socio-economic scale," says Paddy Flannery, manager of the community enterprise centre. "That means that the area doesn't change . . . No normalisation is happening."

Ask any activist what foretold the death of these once-promising estates, and they will mention the tenant-purchase scheme introduced in the 1980s, when local authority tenants were given IR£5,000 to move out to private housing at a time when a new house could be got for around IR£25,000.

"That's where it all began. It drained the more able from the estates," says Flannery. No "normalisation" in Moyross means that for a population of around 4,500, unemployment will remain stuck at 25 per cent, home ownership will stick at around a third, the corporation will continue to see it as a handy place to park families of what Flannery calls, "a particular ilk" and the "dependency culture" will continue to thrive.

The "biggest cul de sac in Limerick", or possibly the country (there is only one road in), has seen four murders in five years and a succession of minor and major feuds.

BACK IN MARCH 1992, the late Jim Kemmy, then mayor of Limerick, talked memorably and with terrible sadness of the estate he described as "situated in a lovely part of Limerick, in the shadow of the Clare hills, a very salubrious area bordering Co Clare".

His focus in Moyross then was Glenagross Park at the lower end, where 70 out of 294 houses were boarded up, there was 80 per cent unemployment, a scenario of wholesale intimidation and rampant glue sniffing, and "dreadful" rat infestation, in a city with 500 applicants on the housing list.

He asked for a 24-hour Garda presence "to discourage the young vandals" and was told by the then minister for justice, Pádraig Flynn, that Limerick had a ratio of one garda for every 231 people, compared to a national average one to 335. It was one of the most heavily policed urban areas in western Europe, said Flynn.

Glenagross has since been virtually re-built and renamed ("like changing Windscale to Sellafield," jokes a resident) and the trouble moved inwards, towards the once-desirable, "most respectable areas in Moyross" - Pineview Gardens, Delmege Park and Craeval Park.

"They let in the bad apples. They know what they are but just to get them off their backs, they just let them in," says Jean.

Yet an application to the Family Support Agency for around €100,000 in funding for a family resource centre (to support such activities as a creche, after-school clubs, self-development classes) in Pineview was turned down a few months ago, says Allen Meagher.

Much as the residents hate to read about it in the national media, it's an area that resembles parts of Belfast at the height of the Troubles. Boarded-up and burnt-out houses are commonplace. Litter is endemic. Untethered horses have full rein over the useless swathes of windblown green space, making it too dangerous for children. There is only one playground on the whole estate, and that is provided by the community centre.

The double wall that cuts off the Limerick Institute of Technology from the estate means that Moyross children intent on going on to third level there (and there are some, despite the public image) have to walk two miles to get to it.

Moyross now is almost entirely covered by CCTV cameras, shadowing buses, vandals, rubbish dumpers and worse. At least two of the murders here are said to have been resolved with CCTV assistance.

This is why Jean and her neighbours feel they are "sitting on a time bomb", "living on their nerves". One resident describes it as "group depression".

"There is no one person to blame and no one answer," says Elaine Slattery, manager of the Ceim ar Ceim centre, a bright, warm, well-maintained building across the road from the estate, with staff who manage to stay upbeat and bright-eyed. Their client base is young people on the edge, referred from the courts via the probation service. Nine students from the evening programme got their Junior Cert results this week amid great joy and hope.

The secret lies in the maximum figure of five in a group, with the vital addition of a support team. For the probation clients, it's no easy way out. Slattery, who was reared in Moyross, as were most of her staff (all garnering third-level qualifications), singles out a component called "Copping On".

"It's to help them to understand the system. They're good at using it okay - to their advantage unfortunately." The idea is to confront them with their own beliefs and challenge them. Slattery speaks of youths with such poor communication skills and self-esteem that it has taken staff up to two years to make eye contact with some. "It's that basic sometimes."

There is no question that the scheme is working. The re-offending rate, says Slattery, "is very, very low. I can think of only three of around 200 who've come through here who re-offended." But Ceim ar Ceim has a waiting list of 70 young people. They've applied for another €76,000 funding this year - "the cost of keeping three prisoners in jail," says Mary Neill, an outreach worker.

OTHER ELEMENTS ARE needed and need to be fast-tracked. "We have no drug counsellors, no guidance counsellors, no counsellors whatever. Do we have enough staff? Are they paid enough? Can we keep the right staff here?" Slattery asks. A third-level qualified support team worker is paid €31,000 for difficult, challenging work, many without a contract.

Slattery is adamant now that it's not merely a case of getting the children early but more importantly to engage the parents and give them the skills. "The girls and boys who come here tell us 'you can do whatever you want with us here but I'm still going back to where I live.' "

Drugs are an issue. "Hash was the drug - though there's a drought at the moment. Heroin is huge," says Niamh Kennedy, a support worker. All three agree that part of the answer is to train, equip and pay local young people to talk to their peers.

"It's like this community needs to stop, and needs to re-focus, to look at what we have and don't have, and to have a plan. The only way to achieve that is if the community owns the plan."

The community should be listened to, is a constant cry. But who is asking the questions? Despite the call for more gardaí, even residents say that there are "15 to 20 squads in and out every day, and there is always a Garda presence".

Gardaí take children on fishing trips, help to run the clubs. But it is also true that only rarely is one seen walking around. The two hard-working community gardaí can circulate with impunity. Others don't seem to be able to do that. This week, when groups of gardaí were on the streets, conducting door to door inquiries, residents were quite startled to see them.

Perhaps the strangest element in this week's tragic story is the fact that it happened in Co Limerick, not the city, due to electoral boundaries. It must be significant that the three areas of Moyross which have most seriously deteriorated in recent times have no representation in city hall. Though they are tenants of the city council, the county council is responsible for the infrastructure. If there is an illegal burning in Pineview, for example, there is no point in ringing city hall.

"There is no local politician with a vested electoral interest there," says Flannery. "Where day-to-day decisions are being made, these people do not have a voice."