‘There is light at the end of the tunnel’ - Westport homeowner urges other pyrite victims to take care of themselves and their family

LINDA Claxton and her three children have endured hell on earth to rebuild their pyrite-stricken Westport home.

The worst of what they have suffered was divulged off the record after The Mayo News was politely asked to pause our voice-recording app 48 seconds into our interview.

Our latest conversation begins with a nod to the first words Linda uttered when this newspaper visited her now-destroyed home: “This is a f**ing nightmare.”

“The nightmare is over for me,” begins Linda in a sitting room equal in size to the one The Mayo News first sat in - minus the fireplace.

“I’m back in my house, my kids are settled again. It’s going to take me a long time to pay it off. The past seven months, we have gone through so much, mentally, physically… they’re seven months that we’ll never get back. The mental health of myself and my children has been knocked completely.”

Whirlwind

A whirlwind of joy, sadness, hope and regret blows through the story told during our hour-long chat in the Claxton’s cosy, unfinished new house.

Linda has been central to every brick, floorboard and slate that was laid here. For half a year, seven days a week, she rose at 6am from her rented house in Kylemore to open the site for the builders at 7.45am.

This was often after dropping her exhausted daughter, Tia, to the bus for Sancta Maria College, and right before working a full shift in a local restaurant.

“There were days I sat outside waiting on people to turn up and them not to turn up, telling me that they’d be there at half-eight, and I’d be sitting there waiting for them and nobody coming. And I’d ring and they’d say, ‘Oh, no, we won’t be there for another two or three days’,” Linda explains.

“One or two times I did have to put my foot down and ring people and say ‘it’s not good enough’. We’re on a timeframe here. If you can’t be here, tell me you’re not going to be here,” she recalls, but adds: “It worked out in the end, and we got it built.”

Overcoming fear

Linda knew nothing about building before being cursed with pyrite. Some months ago, she laid the first brick in her new house – which was built with pumped concrete rather than old-school building blocks, for obvious reasons.

She has handled nearly every floorboard in the house and assembled an entire flatpack kitchen herself.

“Why don’t you just pay somebody to do that?” her children had asked.

“Because I can’t afford to,” their mother had replied.

“‘And why would I ask somebody else to do something that I can do?’. They just looked at me and said: ‘You’re nuts’,” Linda chuckles.

Though arduous at times, Linda enjoyed ‘every part’ of the rebuild and will gladly lend a hand, a screwdriver or an electric saw to any pyrite homeowner who needs it.

“We were the first ones up here to do this [to rebuild their house], so we didn’t know anything. And I just stood there, and I realised that I was making myself and my [three] kids homeless,” Linda says, recalling the moment the digger tore the roof of her old home on a bright, frigid November morning.

“The fear hit me. Was I going to be able to do this? Was I going to be able to afford this? What’s going to happen if I can’t? I had nobody to talk to, because nobody up here had gone through it. I just thought, I had to do it, if not for me, for them three. They need a roof over their head.”

_{A sign outside of Páirc na Coille in Westport (Pic: The Mayo News)}

‘We’re home’

Hundreds of Mayo families have had to endure, and have yet to endure, what Linda describes as the ‘mental torture’ of pyrite.

Her advice to them is simple.

“Whoever is going through this, just mind yourself and mind your family as well. At the end of the day, you will get through this. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but you can’t see it when you are in the early stages of it.”

“The Friday that I moved back in here, I cried, and I said to my kids, ‘We’re home. I’ll never put you through that again’.”

Linda’s house is not yet finished, but it will forever be her home.