Brazen rat attacks Dublin youngster right outside her front door

A teenager is afraid to go back to her own home after a large rat attacked her as she stood outside her front door in the middle of the day.

The unfortunate 14-year-old was bitten on the foot as she waited for her mam to return home to their city centre flat.

Edel, the girl's mother, says residents at Matt Talbot Place in Dublin 1 are under siege as enormous, aggressive rats roam the block's balconies, stairwells and walkways.

The filthy rodents, some of which are so big "you could put collars and leads on them", have become so brazen they don't even move out of the way when people approach them.

Edel told 98FM Dublin Talks' Adrian Kennedy her daughter had just popped her head outside the front door of her flat to see how far off her mam was.

She recalled: "I rang her to to say I was on my way up and to put on the kettle. She came out onto the balcony to see how far away I was and she was just standing there, just dancing as she normally does outside the hall door, and as she was standing there she felt something on her foot.

"So she looked down and she saw then that it was a rat. So she went to lift her foot to get away from the rat, and that’s when he bit her."

Edel said the rat locked on to the terrified teen's foot before she went into "fight or flight mode" and kicked the rodent off a wall.

The brave girl, who her mam said is usually scared of spiders nevermind rats, then managed to kill the animal by stomping repeatedly on its chest.

She continued: “In fright she kind of kicked her foot when he was locked on to her.

"He bit her foot, and he was on stuck onto her foot - the front part of her foot - and she swung her foot then and she kind of kicked it over towards the wall, and the rat ended up letting go, and that’s how she ended up killing it.

“How she did it I don't know - she must have been still in shock and then she just screamed down the whole balcony then, and the neighbours all came out.

"But that was broad daylight."

Edel said her daughter was understandably traumatised by the incident, but was now too scared to come home.

She added: “When we came home from the hospital yesterday it was a battle to get her into the flat. She says she’s not coming back - she says she's going to live down the road with my sister, because she’s terrified of another rat being there.

"She’s afraid of her life of going near where the rat bit her."

Edel said residents first noticed the problem about four years ago when one or two rats would be seen coming out of a box used to house water pipes for the complex.

She said Dublin City Council had sent Pest Control out to deal with the issue, and they had since been out several times to put poison down.

She said the the problem really started to get bad in the last year, and now rats roam the complex without fear, at all hours of the day and night.

She added: “I think they’ve multiplied and had babies and they’re all starting to come out now."
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