It is the smell of the cats that hits you first when you enter the house on the outskirts of An Spidéal in Galway.
It is owned by Cindy Rabbitt, an American citizen who spent much of her career working for the Boston Globe newspaper, and her husband Jerry.
They have been holidaying in Connemara for over 30 years and bought the property to use as a summer home.
The back garden looks out onto the Atlantic. On a clear day the Cliffs of Moher are on view to the left, with na hOileáin Árann to the right.
Inside there is cat hair all over the floors – a reminder of a recently departed rogue tenant and her pets.
In the summer of 2021, Cindy and her husband Jerry were in a hardware store in Connemara when they met another American woman, Brenna Reilly. On hearing their accents, Reilly – who is also from Massachusetts – struck up a conversation with them.
She said that she was familiar with Cindy Rabbitt’s food blog, and before long the pair became friends.
Over the following months, Ms Reilly, who was renting a house in nearby Rosamhíl, would regularly meet Cindy for coffee, and they would cook for each other.
When the Rabbitts returned home to the US, Cindy and Brenna maintained contact via text, email and phone conversations.
Then in April last year, Ms Reilly contacted Ms Rabbitt to say that a catastrophic high tide had flooded her home in Rosamhíl, making it unliveable.
Feeling sorry for her friend, Mrs Rabbitt decided to lease her summer home in An Spidéal to Ms Reilly.
However, Ms Rabbitt got a surprise when she travelled to Ireland a few months later.
“The minute I walked into the house I knew there was a problem. The house was very dirty and there were some things broken… It was filthy. It was horrible,” she said.
She quickly realised that Ms Reilly’s four cats were “not litter box trained. So, there was messes on the floor.” Prime Time has visited the house, where the mess left by the cats is very obvious.
After arriving in An Spidéal last June, Ms Rabbitt also noticed horses in her fields beside the house. It soon emerged that Brenna Reilly had – unknown to the Rabbitts – rented out their fields to a local horse owner. “She actually charged him a fee, which was totally against the lease,” she said.
A few days after her arrival, “things started unravelling” and it became clear Ms Reilly’s story about her home in Rosamhíl flooding did not stack up.
Speaking to Prime Time, Ms Rabbitt said, “why would she tell me such a cuckoo story?”
“The whole story just fell apart, So, I contacted her solicitor, started the process of eviction, and things escalated from there.”
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Cindy Rabbitt took her concerns about her problem tenant – and former friend – to the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB), the body that regulates the private rental sector and deals with disputes between landlords and tenants.
Prime Time has learned this was not the first time Brenna Reilly has come to the attention of the RTB.
So, who is Brenna Reilly? She is originally from Holyoke, in Massachusetts, about an hour drive from Boston.
None of her landlords in Ireland were aware of her secret past – where she had a significant brush with the law. Over a decade ago, she came to the attention of the FBI.
We don’t know exactly when she arrived in Ireland but we do know that in March 2014 she rented an apartment in Salthill in Galway.
By mid-2015, the Salthill landlord had started to notice that some of Ms Reilly’s monthly €900 rental payments had not been paid.
In November that year, the landlord lodged a complaint with the Private Residential Tenancies Board (PRTB) – now called the RTB. The main issue was Ms Reilly’s rent arrears, which amounted to €6,300.
The landlord also complained about Reilly’s reluctance to give maintenance workers access to the apartment to inspect and carry out repair works, saying there was damage done to the apartment “beyond ordinary wear and tear”.
The landlord put a cost of almost €900 on this damage. Like the situation with Cindy Rabbitt’s property almost a decade later, the landlord maintained that some of the dirt and damage was caused by Ms Reilly’s cats.
RTB documents show that the landlord said some items of furniture were missing from the apartment at the end of Reilly’s tenancy. The issue was reported by the landlord to the gardaí. Ms Reilly denied the items were taken.
Ms Reilly lodged a claim in late 2015 against the landlord with the RTB. In it, she claimed that “Galway City Council and the HSE advised that it was not safe to reside in.” Neither public body ever gave such advice, according to the landlord.
In April 2016, the PRTB ordered Brenna Reilly to pay her landlord €7,100 for rent arrears and damages. They noted that some of Reilly’s version of events did “not hold up to scrutiny” and some of the excuses she offered for not paying rent were “not genuine and were certainly not correct.”
Ms Reilly’s application regarding breach of landlord obligations was not upheld by the PRTB.
In November 2016, Brenna Reilly wrote a letter claiming she was unable to repay the landlord. Citing a medical condition, she said she was unable to work and “my situation is unlikely to improve for at least one year if ever.”
She said she would be in contact if her financial circumstances improved and added, “In the meantime, would you agree to a weekly payment of €10 or a lump sum settlement of €750?”
Prime Time understands that after pursuing Brenna Reilly for a lengthy period, the Salthill landlord eventually recouped her rent arrears.
In the period after being evicted from the Salthill property and moving into Cindy Rabbitt’s holiday home in Connemara, Reilly had problems with at least one other landlord, this one linked to a property near Rosamhíl harbour.
She began her tenancy in November 2019 but similar to what happened in Salthill, issues with rent arrears unfolded, culminating in the landlord issuing her with a notice of termination of her tenancy. That eventually led to another RTB Tribunal hearing, which took place on 7 March 2023.
Like before, the landlord was aggrieved over issues such as rent arrears and damages ‘in excess of normal wear and tear.’
According to the RTB Tribunal report, the landlord said that Brenna Reilly refused to allow them access to inspect her property, instead offering a ‘video walkthrough.’
The landlord was not happy that Reilly kept pets in the house and claimed a copy of the tenancy agreement furnished to the RTB was altered by them to remove a clause prohibiting the keeping of pets.
“Cat hair and cat droppings” were an issue again and the landlord claimed carpet would need to be replaced at a cost of €2,000.
In October 2022, when the landlord attempted to get access to service a heat pump, a padlock and chain was placed on the entrance gates, preventing access.
Later that month, the gardaí were called when the landlord tried to get access to inspect the property.
Brenna Reilly also made a series of claims against the landlord to the RTB. Among them she claimed the new increased rent was excessive, far above the market rate. She also claimed that the landlord had not provided any video evidence of cat droppings.
She said she could not explain why signed copies of the leases which contained clauses prohibiting keeping cats in the property were sent from her email address. She alleged that the copies of the emails had been altered, and also claimed that her account had been hacked.
An RTB determination issued on 3 May 2023 found Reilly must pay the landlord €2,300 in rent arrears. Reilly’s claim for breach of landlord’s obligations was “not upheld.” The Tribunal found keeping a cat was grounds for terminating the tenancy, but it did not make any claim for damages. It was the Tribunal’s view that the landlord could only properly assess damages after the tenants vacated the property.
In response to a series of questions from Prime Time about her time as a tenant in properties around Galway, Brenna Reilly said “please be advised that these are open matters before the Residential Tenancy Board.”
Rogue tenants are a fact of life for a minority of landlords. At least two of Ms Reilly’s former landlords no longer rent out their properties to tenants.
Mary Conway, the chair of the Irish Property Owners’ Association, said “in the current situation, for most landlords, who are particularly squeezed with mortgage interest rates, even to miss one rent payment impacts on your payment with a mortgage. So, arrears can build up quite quickly and the landlord finds himself in a very difficult financial position.”
The Rosamhíl landlord is still in the RTB process.
They are among those calling for changes to the rules governing the private rented sector, supporting calls from Irish Property Owners’ Association for the development of a ‘red flag’ system to warn landlords about tenants with a problematic tenancy history.
The Irish Property Owners’ Association (IPOA) says that it takes too long for the RTB process to resolve disputes between tenants and landlords.
“For the most part, most tenants are fine,” Ms Conway of the IPOA told Prime Time.
“But for somebody who’s a serial offender, there should be some kind of a red flag system that the landlord is alerted. I know we’re all very GDPR compliant, but every tenant has to be registered and if a tenant has been a previous offender, it should be flagged on the RTB registration at the time of registration.”
In a statement, an RTB spokesperson told Prime Time that landlords and tenants can check its website to see if a prospective tenant or landlord was the named party of a dispute case. It said that the average processing time for Tribunals last year was 29 weeks.
None of the landlords knew about Brenna Reilly’s prior problems. They were also oblivious to the fact that she is a convicted felon in the United States.
Prime Time has established that before she came to Ireland, Brenna Reilly appeared in court in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington DC, accused of impersonating an FBI agent.
Justin Gelfand, now an attorney in St Louis Missouri, was the US federal prosecutor in the case.
“She had impersonated an FBI agent, in other words, pretended that she was an FBI agent, taking it so far as telling her neighbours that she was in some sort of supervisory capacity,” Mr Gelfand told Prime Time.
“She actually ‘hired’, one of her neighbours to work for what he believed was the FBI. Of course, the whole thing was a ruse.”
The US arrest warrant from the time details Brenna Reilly’s crime. She started to pretend she was an FBI agent in August 2009, telling neighbours she had worked for the organisation since she was 18 years old.
She said she started as an intern and then worked her way up to the position of Assistant Director of the FBI, as well as FBI Director of Forensics.
In an elaborate ruse, she ‘recruited’ two people in Virginia to work for her ‘in the FBI.’ One of them – a neighbour – resigned from his managerial position in an events company to work as Reilly’s assistant in the FBI.
Mr Gelfand said that the neighbour ‘worked’ for her for “approximately three weeks.”
“As I recall it, doing a variety of bizarre things: Transcribing fictitious interrogations that Ms Reilly claimed to have conducted with suspects or perhaps other witnesses of crimes that she claimed she was investigating. [He was also] editing, and perhaps even sending out letters to families of victims of bombings overseas.”
Among the duties she assigned one of her victims to was “…editing condolence letters to the families of the CIA officers who died in the January 2010 bombing in Afghanistan. Reilly claimed the CIA officers were working for her.”
Seven CIA officers were killed by the Taliban in a suicide bombing at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan at the end of December 2009.
“She even went to this individual’s parents’ house over the holidays to pick him up, to purportedly take him to Germany on an official FBI work trip,” Mr Gelfand told Prime Time.
“That, of course, never happened because she never worked for the FBI. The whole thing was a fiction… Unfortunately, he was victimised by a very capable fraudster.”
The former prosecutor told Prime Time the case was “very unusual” particularly as she took the ruse to “such extremes.”
“Broadly speaking, it’s a felony. It’s a serious crime. Felonies are the most serious crimes here in the United States,” Mr Gelfand said.
Brenna Reilly was found guilty in federal court of impersonating an FBI agent and hiring an assistant to work for her as a fake agent in 2010. She was sentenced to 30 days in prison and four months of house arrest.
Approximately, four years later she arrived in Ireland. Over the following years, she became several landlords’ nightmare tenant.
It is unclear where she is living now.
This story features on the 11 January 2024 edition of Prime Time, broadcast at 9.35pm on RTÉ One television.
