Family is forced out of fire damaged home

A BALLINTEER mother and her five children face Christmas without a home after they were forced from their council property when a burglary attempt resulted in the house being set on fire.

Rachel O’Neill, a single mother of four daughters and a son, had to leave her home at Hillview Grove with her children, aged between three and 20, after the incident on the night of Friday, December 2.

She says the house is now uninhabitable after the burglar attempted to enter the property by setting fire to a bin and ramming it into the door.

Although Ms O’Neill and her five children were not in the house at the time, she believes that the children would have been dead as a result of smoke inhalation if they had been.

“My three-year-old daughter suffers from asthma,” she explained. “I have lived in this house for 14 years and this is the first time anything like this has ever happened.”

Ms O’Neill received a phone call from her neighbour to inform her that the house was ablaze. And while the damage was minimised by the prompt arrival of the fire brigade, the family are currently staying at her father’s two-room house.

According to Ms O’Neill, Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council have told her that the family can return to the premises but she insists that the house is “totally smoked out” and not suitable for habitation.

“There is no electricity and we cannot go back there without replacing the carpets, getting a new door and repainting all the walls.

“The smoke entered the children’s rooms from the vents and would have killed them if we had been here at the time.”

The council did not respond to a request for comment at time of going to press.

Report: Andrew Ralph