Your memory of it is right — first month's rent and the deposit to get the keys, then nothing for ten months.
And here's the part I left out. She never asked for the instalment plan. Nothing in the report records her requesting one, proposing a figure, or putting forward any financial evidence. Her evidence ran to a few lines: she was still in the property with her partner and child, Threshold and the council had told her not to leave voluntarily, she needed a determination order for the housing authorities, she accepted the €16,000, she wasn't contesting the notice.
The Tribunal constructed the delayed repayment schedule on its own motion, from two facts it seems — that she was on maternity benefit and intended to return to work.
No statement of means. No enquiry into the partner's income or the household's position. No submission from the landlord on it — and no enquiry into his circumstances either, though he was the one going without €16,000. The tenant's ability to pay was assessed on two sentences; the landlord's ability to wait wasn't assessed at all.
So the creditor's right to enforce a €16,000 debt was cut down to €200 a month, by a body that nobody had asked to do it, on two sentences of evidence. The District Court couldn't make an instalment order that way — it needs a statement of means and an examination. The RTB does it in a paragraph.
Extraordinary stuff.