STEPHANIE Meehan has no doubts about why her partner Fiachra took his own life.
e did it at the end of a lazy Sunday on July 14, one year, 39 weeks and two days since they were evacuated from their death-trap apartment in Priory Hall.
The afternoon sun blazed down on the temporary home they were allocated in Belmayne in North Dublin, while they waited for the mess to be sorted out.
Stephanie, 35, was on a day off from her restaurant job. Fiachra Daly was pleased. A plumber by day, he usually looked after their two children while she worked nights, so Stephanie gave him a much-needed afternoon to himself. He watched football at the Hilton Hotel across the road while she took Oisin, 7, and Cerys, 2, to a barbecue in her parents' back garden nearby.
Back home that evening, Oisin played in the back garden while Stephanie strolled up to the shop with Cerys to buy a bottle of white wine. She and Fiachra had one glass each. She said goodnight, put the children to bed and then turned in herself.
Fiachra was still up at 11pm when Oisin started to cry.
"I shouted down to Fiachra, 'It's fine I have him.' He said 'great'. I gave Oisin a spoonful of Nurofen. I had to massage his legs and I fell asleep beside him. There was nothing out of the ordinary there. It happened regularly ... "
Stephanie awoke beside Oisin the next morning. It was around 9am and she assumed Fiachra had left for work. He was usually gone by 7.30am. She texted him, "Good morning, how are you?" but he didn't reply.
"So I rang him a couple of times. His phone rang out. I didn't really think anything of it," she said.
"Myself and Oisin went into Cerys's room, which is at the front of the house. We went in and woke her. I opened the blinds and saw his van was there and so I shouted up the stairs: 'Fiachra you are late for work'. I went up and the [bedroom] door was closed. I thought that was a bit odd. We don't close the doors in our house. We never have, so that we can hear the children. I opened the door and there he was," she said.
"I felt his face ... I thought that he was kind of messing. I don't know why I thought he was joking but I was just probably in shock. So I rubbed his face. It was cold, and I just knew. I ran down ... and I fell down the flight of stairs."
Her only thought was to get the children out of the house.
"So I just said, 'Oisin, there's somebody upstairs so you have just got to get out, you have got to get out.' Oisin was screaming. I lifted Cerys out in her pyjamas. I got them downstairs and kept them in the kitchen. I rang the emergency services and they arrived. I left then. That was it. That was Monday morning."
Stephanie moved back in with her parents in Baldoyle after her partner's death. Sitting on the edge of a sofa in their front room last Thursday, she urgently and tearfully recounted the extraordinary tragedy that has engulfed her family.
Her children played in another room. Cerys, a blonde-haired impish toddler, chattered away happily. Oisin played with Lego bought by his grandfather as a treat, as he has not been sleeping well.
"It's like he's reverted to being a very young child again. He cries, he grinds his teeth and sleep walks," she said.
"Cerys just keeps asking if her Daddy is coming back."
"We'll get through it," she said stoically, blinking away her tears.
This is the legacy of Priory Hall, the apartment complex in north Dublin thrown up by the delinquent builder Tom McFeely in the last gasp of the Celtic Tiger, when young buyers desperate to get on the property ladder queued to snap up apartments off the plans.
But in October 2011, Dublin City Council declared it an alarming fire trap, capable of being engulfed in flames in less than three minutes.
Stephanie and Fiachra, and their children, were amongst the 256 residents who were evacuated without notice in October 2011 on foot of a High Court order.
Almost two years on, the residents continue to live in limbo, shunted in and out of temporary homes and burdened with mortgages on properties that are now effectively worthless.
There have been numerous expensive High Court cases over who should bear the costs of the Priory Hall debacle and the rent of the displaced residents. There has been long-winded mediation with the residents, much condemnation, and failed attempts to jail McFeely, a former IRA bomber.
But it is in this ordinary sitting room in Baldoyle where the lasting consequences of the biggest building debacle of the boom are most vividly felt.
"I think Priory Hall was the root of Fiachra's problem. I 100 per cent feel that way. There is nothing to make me lean in any other direction," said Stephanie.
They met in Howth when they both turned up for a job interview at a restaurant. They were close friends before they ever embarked on a relationship. Oisin arrived in 2005. They watched Priory Hall being built from their rented apartment nearby. They shopped around for a loan and got a 100 per cent mortgage with KBC Bank for €295,000. They moved into what Stephanie described as their dream home in 2008.
Compared with the €350,000 asking price of other apartments in the area, they thought they were getting a good price. "We didn't overspend ... We didn't over stretch or go beyond our means ... We weren't being reckless. We were trying to be sensible," she said.
It was a duplex with three walls of glass on the top floor, offering views from Dun Laoghaire to Portmarnock. Although the block was not entirely finished, "once we closed the door, we were in our own lovely apartment," she said. "It was our home."
But the problems started almost immediately: damp patches, water seeping through the windows and doors; shoddy plaster work; a balcony tilted the wrong way around so that the water drained into the apartment.
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Stephanie had no idea that there was actually no fireproofing in the cavity walls until Dublin City Council got an emergency evacuation order from the High Court. They spent the next few weeks moving from one hotel room to the next, before finally being allocated a house in Belmayne housing estate.
Their "gorgeous neighbours" welcomed them with cookies and sweets for the children, said Stephanie. But it didn't compensate for their displacement or the stress of watching their mortgage arrears mount up for a property that was not fit to live in.
Michael Dowling, a financial adviser who took on the cause of Priory Hall residents, helped negotiate with the banks. He secured a moratorium on most of their mortgages, including Stephanie and Fiachra's. That meant they didn't have to make the monthly mortgage repayments – in Stephanie's case more than €1,500 a month.
But they had to reapply for the moratorium every few months, a laborious process that they both dreaded. And each month, a letter from KBC showed the mounting arrears on their mortgage.
According to Stephanie, she was always the one who got stressed out. But she now sees that he was struggling with his own anxieties in silence.
They had lots to look forward to: they planned to marry in Spain next year and Fiachra was looking forward to a lads-only trip to the US with his father-in-law.
But on the Thursday before Fiachra took his own life, the usual monthly letter came in the post from KBC Bank. This one warned that there was an outstanding balance of €312,103.86, including arrears of €19,281.48. They were paying interest on the arrears. And as the moratorium on their mortgage had lapsed, the letter pointed out that they also owed a monthly mortgage payment of just over €1,500.
In conclusion, the letter laughably warned that the couple were at risk of losing their home if they couldn't pay. They had already lost their home. The apartment they bought for €295,000 was already a worthless firetrap thanks to its negligent builder, McFeely.
Stephanie showed Fiachra the letter in the car, later that evening.
"We were probably just going out shopping or something like that. He was in the passenger seat. It was after he had just come home from work," she said. "I handed it to him. I said, 'Here Fiachra, I can't actually handle this. Here you go ... ' He just said, 'Look I'm not able for this right now.' I said, 'Fine', I didn't think anything of it at the time."
With hindsight, she knows his refusal to read the letter was unusual for him. Fiachra had never showed signs of depression, she said. He was always outwardly happy, and protectively shouldered most of the burden of their financial problems.
"He was concerned about us having to pack up and move again for the fifth time. He often said to my parents that it really got to him that he couldn't provide a safe home for us. He was old fashioned in that sense. That's all he really wanted. He wasn't a man who wanted any luxuries or anything like that. Nothing made him happier than spending time with us, with his family."
Fiachra's funeral in his native Howth is a blur and she can hardly remember the weeks that followed.
One Tuesday afternoon two weeks ago, Stephanie took Oisin and Cerys to the playground.
"I was kind of looking around because there were more dads there than mothers. And I felt there was so much injustice that Fiachra would never take his children to the playground again ... I came home and I wrote to Enda Kenny," she said.
She told him that Fiachra had taken his own life, following a week of banks "looking for payment for a property that we can't live in".
"I wrote it in one draft and I pressed 'send'. I didn't have to think about it. That's just how I was feeling," she said.
When it went up on the Priory Hall support group's Facebook page, the dormant story of Priory Hall was propelled to the top of the political agenda.
When he was door-stepped by reporters, Enda Kenny blustered that he had asked for a "report" on Priory Hall and "needed time" to consider it. Meanwhile, Phil Hogan, the Environment Minister, who has repeatedly excused himself from commenting for fear of prejudicing ongoing court proceedings over the rent row, went on radio to suggest rebuilding Priory Hall at a cost of €12m.
"I am actually infuriated," said Stephanie. She believes it's only the huge public support she has received for highlighting Fiachra's death that has suddenly loosened their tongues: "It is a shame that it has taken the death of a resident for them to realise this isn't going to go away and that something needs to be done with it," she said.
"I think if they had been given the opportunity to ignore it for years to come and keep hiding behind the courts, they would have."
One sad legacy of Fiachra's death is that that their €295,000 will be paid off by their mortgage protection insurers. Stephanie's mortgage adviser had informed KBC that Fiachra had died by suicide.
KBC then sent in a crudely insensitive letter last week in which the lender reminded Stephanie that she still owes them €16,803.78, even after Fiachra's life policy pays out she will continue to be charged interest until it is paid off. And until the death certificate comes through, they still want her to pay the monthly mortgage payment of over €1,500. It was only after the media storm erupted last week that a senior KBC manager rang Stephanie's mortgage adviser requesting to meet her this Tuesday.
Stephanie said she cannot walk away from Priory Hall.
"He was such an incredible human being. He was always happy. He burst with love for me and the children. If any of the other residents of Priory Hall can gain something from what I have lost ... in years to come we might take comfort from it."
