Cork city residents fearful as neighbouring home was stacked with rotting rubbish
The living room in the flat in Glenamoy Lawn.
The smell from a social housing flat on Cork city’s northside was so bad this week that neighbours feared the flat might contain a dead body.
When locals entered the deserted first-floor five-room apartment, they found it was full of bags of rubbish, rotting food, and clear signs of rodent infestation.
Even in the hallway outside the flat, the smell is overwhelming, and after five minutes reporter felt physically ill.
The flat is in Glenamoy Lawn in Mayfield, and locals claim the council has been aware “for months” of a serious public health risk there, having replaced the lock on the door over the summer.
In July, they said, the council responded to reports of a leak coming from the property into the residence below.
There are four large rooms in the flat, and a bathroom, and each room is filled with bags of rubbish.
There are multiple stacking trays full of groceries and prepared meals, some dated June of this year, and all of which have gone off.
Rodent droppings cover the parts of the floors that are still visible, and neighbours say that the flat is overrun with rats.
Tenants living in the building in Glenamoy Lawn say they have been living with the smell for months, and over the summer the foul air routinely set off fire and carbon monoxide alarms inside the flat.
Locals said they entered the flat on Wednesday because they were worried that there might be a dead body in there.
Instead, they found rooms filled with refuse and decaying food.
The flat is without electricity, and the ceiling in the batchroom and the kitchen has partially fallen in.
One resident said the smell had grown increasingly bad over the summer.
“It’s just got worse and worse and worse, you feel like vomiting a lot of the time, you can’t open your window on the hot days because the flies were coming in everywhere, inside the building and outside,” he said.
Ted Tynan, Workers’ Party city councillor for the north-east ward, said Cork City Council, as the landlord, had a duty of care to its tenants.
“The council is well aware of the situation in the flats, and the rubbish that’s left in there, leading to rodent infestation, impacting on the well-being of the neighbours in the area, I was up in that flat earlier and I am feeling sick after it, I can’t imagine the poor people living with that smell 24 hours a day,” he said.
“It’s an appalling situation.”
A spokesperson for Cork City Council said that because of data protection reasons, the council could not comment on individual housing or tenancy cases.
“But processes are in place to address housing and tenancy issues, if and when they arise,” they said.
There are 109 homes in Glenamoy Lawn and 157 homes in the neighbouring Ard Bhaile estate.
Tenants have for years complained that the neighbourhood is “infested” with rats, an issue which has been exacerbated by a minority of tenants who are dumping rubbish in the central green area of the Glenamoy Lawn flats, a square of approximately two acres. That square is overgrown and heavily littered.
Almost a decade ago, Cork City Council replaced the heating system in the estates, which had previously used an air-to-water system.
The new air-to-air system, introduced between 2016 and 2017, is extremely unpopular with tenants, who have variously described it as extremely expensive to use and “completely useless”.
Tenants claim rats are using the estates’ former boiler room’s tunnels and pipes to move between the flats.
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