ABANDONED in a caravan in County Limerick, miles from her original home and with no idea where she will live.
That’s the reality facing a young mother-of-nine feels who was left homeless in the wake of the St Mary’s Park floods last month.
Jessica McNamara and her family of six girls and three boys now feel “abandoned” as she adjusts to life in an open field with her sick children sleeping in chairs and on the floor of the one-bed caravan while they wait for a new home.
The 33-year-old was moved from her St Munchin’s Court home when the Shannon burst its bank and flooded her house to such extent that the floodwater ripped the fireplace from the wall.
However, despite the intervention of President Michael D Higgins when he visited the stricken Limerick community last week, the family remain living in a disused caravan without a toilet or running water.
Three of her children are in nappies and on bottles. If any of the others need a toilet during the night “they use a bucket in the dark”, she said.
The young mother says she is at her “wits end” and “in despair”.
Jessica told the Limerick Post that “this is killing me and no one will give me an answer about what is happening.”
Everyday, the 33-year-old travels from her Cappamore caravan to wash and make fresh bottles for her young babies. She brings five children to school and preschool and then waits with relatives in St Mary’s Park to collect them again.
This week, she tried speak with Minister for Housing Jan O’Sullivan and attended her clinic in St Mary’s Park but there was no sign of any alternative accommodation for her.
She was offered accommodation at Thomond House – a refuge for homeless women – and a three bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building in Broad Street but felt there were not suitable.
She was told by officials to “keep and eye out” for a place to live and when she suggested a recently vacated three bedroom house in the village where her caravan is located, she was told that someone would get back to her, “but they never did”.
Jessica revealed that her children are becoming more ill and her three-year-old daughter is being treated in hospital for early stage pneumonia. Her six-month-old baby has a viral infection and Jessica herself is “on a raft of medicine” according to her mother, Kathleen.
“I’ve had to collect so much medicine from the chemist for Jessica and the kids. They said that Jessica should go home and put her feet up and relax and she didn’t look well – I mean how can she do that?”, her mother Kathleen asked.
The 64 year old grandmother said that “those kids will be taken out of that caravan in a box, things have gotten so bad.”
“I’ve my mother still with us at 94 and I go to her in the afternoons. I have one of Jessica’s boys here with me plus my own son. If I could take them in, I would but they need something more and we thought it would have been done by now. That’s all we are looking for, a decent roof for her and the kids,” she said.
Jessica’s 14-year-old son is staying with his grandmother in her St Mary’s Park home which was not damaged by the floods.
However, Kathleen says that her daughter and her grandchildren need to get back on their feet and into a “safe and warm house as soon as possible, because you can’t have Jessica getting any sicker or her kids sleeping on a caravan floor.”
Minister O’Sullivan, who pledged to act on the President’s pleas, said this Wednesday that efforts to find Jessica a home were ongoing.
Meantime, works are advancing with the replacement of “white goods lost in the floods” according to Minister O’Sullivan who added that the process “is at the next stage now”.
She also noted that while Jessica’s case is one that hit media headlines, “the work and liaison with regeneration in terms of others displaced and affected by the floods is continuing at pace”.
The Minister also said that the information base at the Kings Island Community Centre is also handling many of the issues as well as providing necessary updates to families and homeowners in the parish.
