A couple who retired to Ballina after a lifetime working in the UK face the possibility of having to rebuild their home if the blocks test positive for pyrite.
Mary Chirgwin worked in England as a nurse for 38 years before returning to Ballina in December 2020. She and her husband bought a house in the Church Road area and hoped to settle down to a quiet and peaceful retirement. However, around the start of 2023, Mary began to notice cracks appearing in a gable wall at the back of the house and inside the kitchen. She told the Western People that alarm bells started ringing when she read about pyrite in the local papers.
“I didn’t know what pyrite was but I learned about it from reading about it in the local press. Then I looked it up online to learn more and, from that, found that our house was built within the timeline of pyrite, which then put it in our head as a possibility,” she said.
An initial test was carried out and she was told that there was one crack that met the criteria for further testing, while the others were too small.
“The others weren’t big enough but because it is a pebble-dashed house, I think the cracks might be bigger inside the pebbledash and just haven’t come through.”
Mary said that other cracks, albeit smaller, have appeared but she is not sure what else the issue could be.
“I’d prefer to have a drill test done to see if we have pyrite to know where we stand. I cannot see what other cause it could be in Mayo with pyrite everywhere in Ballina,” she said.
“If it were something else, we could get a builder to try and fix it.”
