Leitrim father was 'shocked' when told he and his family had six months to find another home

The number of eviction notices issued by landlords rose by 41% in the last three months of 2025 compared to the same time a year earlier, according to data from the State's Residential Tenancies Board and this week, the Leitrim Observer spoke to a father who was given six months notice last year, along with his wife and children, who live in Manorhamilton. 

Speaking to the Leitrim Observer, *Darren, said that the family are currently residing in a house they have been renting since 2020 in Manorhamilton. They found themselves in a panic last year when the landlord told them he could not renew their lease and they had just six months to find somewhere else to live. "Last July, we got a notice out of the blue saying that the landlord wasn't able to renew our lease so that we would have six months in which to leave. That was a shock to the system."

He described his landlord as "very much at the nice end of the scale; for the past five years he's been very helpful etc. I guess he was saying that he didn't want to kick us out but his hand was being forced because he had to sell the house."

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The RTB received 5,207 eviction notices in the fourth quarter of 2025 with 62% of notices given because the landlord wished to sell the property.

Darren continued: "We were planning on buying a house and trying to get mortgage approval; not in 2025 but this year. We didn't quite have our ducks in a row from a work point-of-view. We decided to try and apply for a mortgage but we never thought we'd get approval based on what everyone told us; people had said that it was really difficult to get mortgage approval and then find a house, buy a house and have the whole thing done in six months."

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The Manorhamilton resident said that while trying to secure a mortgage, the family also had to find somewhere to stay in the meantime, which Darren soon realised was going to be a difficult task. "We wanted to find somewhere to rent for around six months, possibly 12, as a stop-gap. You read about it and hear about how hard it is but until we actually looked for somewhere remotely nearby to where we are; you just realise there is just so little. It's not just Leitrim or the north-west, it's everywhere."

He said that if the family had been given a year to leave the property, they wouldn't have been under so much stress. "We really didn't know what we were going to do. We had friends that could probably put us up but with children, it's harder to do something like that. We could have moved home for a while but we both work in this area and our kids go to school locally so it wasn't really an option."

The family eventually located a house through a "friend of a friend and we were going to move to the house. This was all happening around Christmas time; there's no good time but that is definitely not a good time to be trying to move house or anything like that."

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The couple were fortunately approved for a mortgage, "slightly sooner than we thought; that happened in December. There was a house we had our eye on which we are still in the process of buying which can run on and on but hopefully we are going to closing that in the next few weeks."

Darren approached the landlord about staying in their current accommodation for another couple of months until the sale went through. "The landlord said that he couldn't wait indefinitely but if it's just going to delay things by another few months than I'm happy enough to do that. We initially thought it would be finalised by the end of March but now it's looking like it will be end of April or early May. That was unusual and I don't think most people would have negotiated something like that."

*Names have been changed