24/05/2023
A trainee nurse who has been forced to sleep in her car down a side street in Bray has described her desperate search for a place to live as “an absolute nightmare”.
For months Lauren Masterson (40) has been posting regularly with the same desperate plea for a suitable place to rent while she completes the final year of her degree in Mental Health Nursing at UCD, working 14-hour shifts as an intern at a psychiatric institute in Dublin alongside her studies.
She says there is no emergency accommodation in Wicklow at all and that she applies for everything on Daft multiple times a day.
Her request is for a two or three-bedroomed home in or around Bray for herself and her children aged 14 and seven. Including help from the Housing Assistance Payment Scheme (HAP), Lauren has a budget of €2,300 per month and says she has her first month’s rent and deposit ready to go. The only issue is, there is nowhere to go.
The last year “has been an absolute nightmare, moving from place to place,” she said.
“I’ve had to give my kids to a relative, so I’m watching a relative raise my children for months now. I had to take time out of my internship, which means I’m going to qualify later. But the stress of not having somewhere to live with my children is soul-destroying.
“I’ll take a couch wherever I can get one and I’ll sleep in my car as well. Homeless services have nothing to offer me, the only thing they can offer me is a place in Gorey. But I can’t make that commute with the kids and then to Dublin, where I’m on internship. Because I work from 7.30 in the morning until 9.00 at night.
"I find it harder now that I’m on HAP to even get a reply from anybody. I send emails on Daft, multiple times a day. I’ll send them first thing in the morning, I’ll do it at lunchtime and I’ll do it in the evening as well. But I never get a reply.”
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