BUNGALOW BLITZ

Excerpts from an interview with Síle Mooney, 2001

Interview by Joanne Lacey. Click here to hear short excerpts from these interviews as read by Michael Sherrin.

Síle: I don’t even want to think about the building of this house! Oh it was terrible. Never get a family member to help you build a house. We would go back to Dublin, and every time we left he would leave too, and when we came back we’d have to go around in the car to find him and bring him back to do a bit more. Six years it took to build, six years. It was finished in 1982.

Síle: I did my hip in shifting cement. Shifting cement! I shifted… There was a lorry load of chips for pebble dash and it was dumped there at the top of the lane and nobody could come and go, and I came out with the shovel one Sunday morning and shifted the whole lot myself. I painted all this and all the wallpaper all of it myself, all that, never very well done, but all done myself. Never get a relation to do anything.

Ciarán: A history of bungalows now, why would you want to do that, that’s very strange, what kind of history could they have they are so recent?

Síle: The planning on this house on the headland here it was terrible! It had to be low lying to fit in with the lines of the land. It couldn’t be as modern as some of the other bungalows, it had to be plain. It had to look more like the older houses. The roof had to be the same colour, and the walls, and everything had to be… you couldn’t do what you wanted.

Síle: This town land had eleven houses, mostly little shacks really. This house was built on existing ruins. This was Patrick’s mothers house. It was easier to get planning if you built on an existing house. It was a couple of hundred years old. I do remember when it had a roof and they used it for storing potatoes. They had rates on rural housing then, so if it still had a roof it was subject to rates, so they probably took the roof off. We built this house over the ruins.

ENDS

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