RAT IN ME KITCHEN

They sometimes dance in the streetlight, thrown across the centre of the yard in the shape of a triangle. Sometimes they stop to snuggle up to each other. They don’t know that we’re watching them. Or perhaps they do, and don’t care. Here’s some more, scampering about; looking for dinner. And in the shadows you can hear more. There’s movement everywhere in the yard, and the bins are shaking and the rubbish rustling as the rats feed.

I’m looking out from a bathroom window of one of the Gloucester Street flats. These are big rats, as big as puppies, and there are maybe twenty of them in the yard below. Mick, who lives in one of these flats, has been watching one particular rat sitting in the centre of the yard grooming itself. He claps his hands. (Mick, that is, not the rat.) The rat runs a few feet, then settles down again. It’s scared of humans alright.

There are children and old people in Gloucester Street flats, and they’re afraid to go out into their own yard. People on the bottom floor won’t open their windows. The yard belongs to the rats.

Gloucester Street is right beside The City Arts Centre, and only a rat’s throw from the Financial Centre over the river. In fact, across the road from the flats is a plush, new business centre, with fake Roman pillars. Things are picking up in this area . . . for some.

Others must live with the rats; rats who become more numerous by the week. Mick has been in touch with Dublin Corporation on several occasions to try and get something done about the problem. He’s looking for proper bins for starters, which can be closed so that the rats stop using the yard like a free restaurant. He wants the holes and nests they have dug in the yard to be filled in, and for some poison to be laid down. “It’s a disgrace,” he says. “You would think we were living in 1934, not ‘94.” In fact, he informs me that back then tenants in the very same area were actively protesting against poor housing conditions and rat infestation. “They’re probably the grandchildren rats of back then,” he says, laughing.

It’s no laughing matter, though. I got in touch with Dublin Corporation and got the usual run-around. It was the Estate Supervisor’s job; it was the Eastern Health Board’s job; it was the Maintenance Supervisor’s job. And I’d have to get in touch with the Public Relations Officer if I wanted any further information.

Mick says that he’s already got a petition together and that the tenants are determined to do whatever is necessary to get rid of this menace. Fair play to them, because all jokes aside, rats are notorious disease carriers, and it is an absolute disgrace that a horde of them should be allowed to nest freely in people’s backyards. “If this was happening in Blackrock,” Mick says, “the corpo or whoever would be out in double quick time. But maybe they think that we’re used to them or something. Well, we’re not. And we intend to do whatever we have to do to make sure that they’re got rid of.”

• Gerry McGovern