A woman highlights what she sees as the injustice of a Dublin Corporation rent scheme.
The Dublin Corporation differential rents scheme enables tenants to pay rent according to their means. This system is for new tenants. Existing tenants of houses retain their fixed rent.
Shortly after Miss Kennedy’s family moved to their Dublin Corporation house in 1932 her mother died.
These houses have no bathrooms, outdoor toilet, we have no inside repairs done.
As her father was an invalid, Miss Kennedy essentially became the mother of the family and she raised nine children. On the death of her father, Miss Kennedy discovered she has been put on to the differential rates system. Were her mother alive, the fixed rent would have passed directly to her.
Due to her disability benefit, the initial rent increase for Miss Kennedy is small. But if she returns to work the increase will see her rent rising from 30 to 63 shillings per week.
That is new differential rents scheme that’s been issued for Ballymun area, and these houses are 37 years old they could not be compared with the new houses.
When a new tenant moves into a house the building is repaired and modernised. Although Dublin Corporation is treating Miss Kennedy as a new tenant resulting in a differential rent, they are refusing to modernise or carry out indoor repairs to her outdated home.
Miss Kennedy is particularly aggrieved having always worked and paid the rent,
Yet I’m nobody then, I’m a new tenant as far as the law stands after 37 years paying the rent.
Her sense of injustice is heightened knowing she is the only tenant on the street paying the higher differential rent, yet she has been paying rent before many of her neighbours were born.
This episode of 'Newsbeat’ was broadcast on 18 June 1969. The reporter is Cathal O’Shannon.
