The ghost estate of Christmas present
The Brogans bought their dream home outright so their daughter would have playmates, seven years on they’re trapped i
HARDLY a soul is stirring in the small Co. Laois village of Borris-in-Ossory on an overcast Thursday afternoon, its main street desolate and the local hotel – once a crowded hotspot on Saturday nights – now permanently shut. Across from the church, a young woman walks alongside a little girl carrying a schoolbag, both wrapped up warmly against the bitter winter cold. The woman points to a right turn just at the edge of town which will lead to the Glenall housing estate. ‘You’ll see a load of abandoned houses,’ she says. ‘Good luck.’ That is the first sight to greet visitors to this unrealised Celtic Tiger dream; the first row of homes is completely empty, the showhouses stripped of their fittings and the windows, some broken, give a bleak glimpse into derelict rooms. In the heart of the estate, the view is not much better: cars are parked in front of just four houses, the rest of the driveways empty. At the very end of the estate is one more car and next to it stands a small, lonely tree decorated with Christmas lights – a shining blue string of bulbs doing its best to bring some festive cheer to this soulless neighbourhood. Behind it, the house is warmly lit, a Christmas tree and stocking on the mantel visible through the Brogan family’s front window. On their door hangs a Santa sign emblazoned with ‘Happy Holidays’, but it’s the only open door in their row of semi-detached homes. This is not what they signed up for. ‘There was originally supposed to be 81 houses here, and a crèche,’ says Rhoda Brogan, 38, as her seven-year-old daughter, Saoirse, enjoys an after-school snack at the kitchen table. ‘We were sold a lifestyle. I thought there would be loads of kids for her to play with; there’s no one.’
Rhoda and her husband, John, bought their three-bedroom home nearly seven years ago, looking forward to raising Saoirse on a happy family estate with other children. They sold their previous home – ‘in the middle of nowhere’ as Rhoda describes it – and were able to buy the €215,000 property outright, with no mortgage.
‘You could be sitting here crying, saying, “Christ Almighty, there’s no one here,” and it’d drive you mad’
‘That was the biggest thing, really – kids for her to play with,’ Rhoda says. ‘That was the whole idea of buying in an estate. You could be sitting here crying and saying, “Christ Almighty, there’s no one here,” and it’d drive you mad,’ says Rhoda. ‘But you get used to it, get on with it.’
Only five of the 26 houses in Glenall are occupied. There was a sixth but the family who lived three doors down from the Brogans moved out just weeks ago because they were unable to meet mortgage payments.
‘I’d say there will be more going eventually. There will be no one here,’ says Rhoda. ‘There are two houses here that aren’t mortgaged and I’d say they’ll be the only two left.’
Her husband John shakes his head. ‘At this stage, three families have thrown back the keys,’ he says.
Rhoda interjects: ‘ We were lucky in some ways, I suppose, in the boomtime; we sold a house just down the road. It had upped in value. I don’t know how it upped so much, but it did, and we were blessed to get rid of it at the time. Then again, we bought at the time as well.’
When they moved into Glenall, they expected other new residents to join them and the proposed works to be completed. For years, though, they were surrounded by rubble and bulldozers, unfinished roads and uncompleted utilities. Sewage flowed into an adjacent field which had been the planned site of dozens of new houses; building materials, rocks and litter were just steps from the Brogans’ home – a ‘heap of muck’, John says.
‘The sewerage wasn’t connected to anything down there; sewage was just flowing down the field. It was all just rubble,’ Rhoda says. ‘We used to walk around the site just for something to do in the evenings.’
Those rambles, yielding discoveries such as a dead fox – which clearly made an impression on Saoirse, who keeps bringing it up – were a far cry from the playdates Rhoda had hoped to see her daughter enjoy.
It was only two years ago that the sewerage was fixed and a fence was put up between the estate and desolate lot. Glenall is now better kept but the loneliness remains – and problems are still being fixed.
This will be the Brogans’ first Christmas with street lights installed around their home; up until September, the estate had been plunged into total darkness each evening.
‘For seven years, we had no lights,’ Rhoda says. ‘It was pitch black; you couldn’t see.’
Her husband adds: ‘If you went out at night time, you could reverse into somebody’s car, because you wouldn’t see them.’
Such collisions happened twice outside their own home when relatives came to visit.
‘I would be nervous if John went somewhere for a night or something,’ Rhoda says.
Mostly, however, they feel safe in their house – though they’ve witnessed their fair share of anti-social behaviour and other issues. In a trend mirrored on ghost estates across the country, teenagers have vandalised many of the empty houses.
‘There was one house at the front, and it was a complete showhouse – absolutely beautiful – and they just wrecked it,’ Rhoda says. ‘They actually pulled down the stairs and everything out of it. I don’t know how they did it or had the strength to do that sort of stuff. They did try and set fire to a couple of them.’
Just days after the recent departure of their neighbour, they noticed another suspected case of looting.
‘He wasn’t gone a week until I heard our dog barking one night, going mad – and then the
next day he came to collect any mail off us, so I said to him, “Just check everything, because the dog was going mad,” and there his boiler was screwed out, ready to take away the following night.
‘We locked it in our house for him,’ John says.
On several occasions, Rhoda watched trucks drive in and out of the estate, loading up on building supplies or whatever else could be stripped from the vacant homes.
‘I rang the guards about several things in here, like, “There’s a van loading up stuff over there”,’ Rhoda says.
‘The houses all got boarded up in September, after seven years of people in and out of them, in and out of them. You’re not going to go out and tackle them, because you’re living here – and you’re not going to have them stripping your house next week when you’re gone somewhere. It’s horrible. Anyway, there’s nothing you can do.’
Last summer – when Saoirse enjoyed sitting in the garden, soaking her feet in a portable child’s pool – there was another concern.
‘There was somebody squatting in one of the houses across the way,’ Rhoda says. ‘I don’t know who it was. It was worrying, because she’s outside in the summer. At the same time, you’d be just saying to yourself, you don’t want to see some man walking around that you don’t know – any man, woman, anybody.’
For company, Saoirse will have friends over or go to her friends’ or cousins’ homes. She loves dolls and horses and riding her little bicycle – a sad sight when she’s the only one
‘There is no possibility of new neighbours. It’s going to always be a ghost estate’
on the estate, circling the same paths alone, riding across weed-strewn, deserted driveways. To fill the hole, they adopted a rescue dog two years ago – hoping Buddy, a goodnatured terrier, would help entertain Saoirse.
‘He’s great company for her. I’m glad I got him now. He’s part of the family and lives in the house and that’s it,’ Rhoda says.
The Brogans don’t see the situation changing any time soon. ‘If you wanted to buy one of these houses in the morning, you would not know where to go,’ John says. ‘I know one man who did want to buy one, and there was no phone number. You can go to Ulster Bank, you can go to Nama, nobody knows who owns these empty houses here.
‘There is no possibility of new neighbours. I think the whole lot will be sold in one go. It’s going to always be a ghost estate.’
At the moment they’re making the best of the situation, continuing to add personal touches to the house and resign themselves to the desolate situation.
Asked whether the family would consider leaving, Rhoda is thoughtful.
‘If everybody else is gone, and they said, “Look, we’ll give you the money to go,” we possibly would.’
In the meantime, they’ll spend yet another Christmas opening presents together as a family, enjoying the festive bastion of their home in the middle of the Glenall estate’s resounding silence and stillness before heading to Rhoda’s parents nearby.
‘There’s never anybody here at Christmastime,’ Rhoda says. ‘We’re the only ones here on Christmas morning. Everyone else is gone to their parents or wherever; we’re the only couple here.’
Rhoda, who intends to run for the local council in the spring, says their current living situation is ‘far from ideal’ – and she knows there are families in the same desolate circumstances not just in Laois, but around the country.
‘In the beginning, there should never have been this many houses built in Borris,’ she says. ‘I don’t know now what will happen with them.
‘I don’t know where the people are ever going to come out of to fill these houses.’