‘We’ve now got a house costing us half the price of rent’
ELEVEN families have received the keys to their new affordable homes, with one couple telling how their mortgage was now almost half their old rent payments.
Parents Alison Griffin (28) and Kieran Roche (25) had all but given up on ever affording their own family property in Dublin until they came across a Facebook post advertising affordable homes in Ballymun two years ago.
Yesterday, pregnant Ms Griffin, her partner Kieran and their two daughters, Sophie (4) and Hannah
(3), were handed the keys to their new €177,000 three-bed home on which they will pay €600 a month for the mortgage – a fraction of their previous €1,050 rent.
“We had pretty much given up on ever owning our own home,” Ms Griffin said.
“The prices round Dublin are far too high and we just didn’t have a chance. But we saw the advertisement on Facebook and thought ‘why not go for it’. And now today, here we are and it’s amazing. The mortgage will be almost half our rent and we will own our own home.
“We had wasted around
€50,000 on rent over the years and we couldn’t even have afforded a deposit until we were in our late 30s but now we are moving into our own home and our girls will have a bedroom each, they’ll have a garden to play in and a community we will all be part of.”
The families yesterday moved into 11 of 28 homes now occupied under the Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance CLG affordable housing scheme in Baile na Laochra, Ballymun.
The development is an affordable housing scheme aiming to provide integrated homes in mixed income communities, with support from local authorities.