The Inishowen peninsula in Donegal is a place of extravagant beauty. But driving along the road from Letterkenny north into the peninsula, the signs suspended on lamp-posts and the murals on the gable end of some buildings offer a stark reminder that all is not well beneath the vast skies and majestic landscapes. “100% redress,” the signs read. “Enough is enough.”
When you ask someone around here when the cracks first began appearing, it is not a metaphor. Ann Owens was one of the first to spot them spreading along the exterior walls of her house. “I noticed 10 years ago that my bungalow was cracking on the outside,” she says. Her insurance company sent out an engineer who was baffled.
About the same time, further west in the county near Milford, Eamonn Jackson had a chartered surveyor out to look at an oil leak. He showed the engineer some hairline cracks in the gable end that he had initially attributed to settlement. He painted over them, but the cracks returned. The surveyor was able to fit a 1 cent coin into the crack. “He said, ‘I’m seeing this in other homes in the county, and I want to look into it a little bit more’.”
Image Credit: The Irish Times