Standing in her maisonette in south Dublin, Janice Maguire points to the small double bed she shares with three of her young sons.
“Two of them [aged seven and five] are down the bottom of the bed, and then myself and the youngest [aged four] are up here,” she says.
Maguire (39) lives in the two-bedroom home on Lissadel Road in Drimnagh with her seven children. The maisonettes, built in the early 1950s and operated by Dublin City Council, are flats with units at ground and first-floor level and gardens on either side.
Maguire’s 18-year-old daughter shares the other bedroom with her 12-year old brother, with his single bed stacked up against the wall during the daytime to give the family more space. Clothes are dried on a rack in the narrow hallway between the rooms.
RM Block
“Two of the kids can’t stay overnight with me because there’s no room,” says Maguire.
“It’s not good for the kids not to be with their mother. My eldest son (19) stays with my sister and my other son (15) stays with his grandmother. Otherwise they would be sleeping on the couch.”
Maguire and three of her children were awarded damages against the local authority in the Circuit Civil Court in 2016. Her barrister told the court Maguire and her children had suffered “recurring respiratory illness” due to damp and mould in their home.
“If you don’t leave the windows open, the green mould comes back in the corners of the rooms,” she says. “The council came out to fix the dampness but it just keeps coming back.”
Despite that persistent issue, Maguire says the biggest problem she and her family face is overcrowding.
“You try to keep it as clean as you can but it’s constantly crowded,” she says.
“It’s not as if I’m asking Dublin City Council for a mansion, an extra bedroom would be grand, even convert the attic.”
Maguire says she has been on a transfer list for a four- or five-bedroom home for 14 years. She pays €108 in rent a week.
The Lissadel Road maisonettes are not on the council’s housing regeneration programme, it says, but maintenance works have been carried out over recent years, such as external and roof insulation, new windows and doors and the installation of mechanical ventilation.
Councillor Daithí Doolan has recently been doing door-to-door surveys of council homes around the Dublin 10 and 12 areas. The Sinn Féin representative says he has received “hundreds” of responses from residents in Davitt House, Bernard Curtis House and the Bluebell and Lissadel Road maisonettes. Problems with damp, mould, rodents, leaks, broken toilets and windows are raised frequently.
Doolan says there needs to be a “huge injection” of Government funding into the maintenance and regeneration of local authority units across the city.
Dublin City Council manages more than 29,000 social homes with about 68,000 tenants. It announced plans eight years ago to regenerate more than 6,000 of the city’s oldest and most dilapidated flats under a 15-year plan to raise social housing standards.
The council was the subject of a ruling from the European Committee of Social Rights in 2017 over the poor condition of some of its older flats complexes. The Strasbourg-based committee found the human rights of tenants had been breached because of a failure to provide them with adequate housing.
Doolan says the Government is pursuing a “one-size-fits-all” policy when it comes to local authority housing. He says this does not take into account the fact that Dublin has the highest concentration of such housing and the oldest stock.
“We get the same amount of money for maintenance per unit as counties such as Clare and Kerry, and that simply doesn’t work. Dublin needs adequate funding to carry out essential works on our properties to make sure people have decent, quality housing,” he adds.
“We need the Government to recognise the level and concentration of poor quality housing, and that needs to be treated differently than the response to other more rural-based local authorities.”
The Department of Housing earlier this month said it could no longer support the council’s proposal for the regeneration of Oliver Bond House in the south inner city – one of Dublin’s largest, oldest and most dilapidated flat complexes.
The council’s plan would have seen 74 smaller flats across three blocks amalgamated to make 46 larger homes, but the department said it could not back such a “large reduction in homes during a housing crisis”.
Oliver Bond House is one of a small number of council flat complexes built in the 1930s by renowned city architect Herbert Simms. The complex, and others such as Pearse House and Markievicz House, are protected structures and cannot readily be demolished and rebuilt to modern living standards.
Some €50 million a year is set aside specifically for regeneration projects that require refurbishment and remediation works, according to Minister for Housing James Browne, who said funding for such projects was at “record levels”.
The Minister pointed to “significant spending” on Dublin projects such as the demolition and rebuilding of homes at St Michael’s Estate, O’Devaney Gardens, St Teresa’s Gardens, Dominick Street and Dolphin House.
“The funding stands available for the regeneration of Oliver Bond House,” he said. “What the department cannot stand over is a reduction in the number of homes. We will not fund a reduction in the number of homes.”
Former chief justice Frank Clarke, who chairs the Oliver Bond Regeneration Forum, said the rejection of the project as currently proposed meant there would be larger numbers of studio and one-bedroom flats, which would be a regressive outcome for the community.
“I personally think it’s the wrong decision,” he said.
Lorcan Sirr, senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin, says the council should be trusted to develop their housing units.
“The loss of 28 flats in the context of a total housing output of probably 40,000 units this year seems to be a very weak basis on which to refuse permission to redevelop,” he says.
“The other thing is, if the department can refuse permission to [Dublin City Council] to redevelop it, that says to me that ultimately the department are responsible for the conditions there. If they weren’t responsible, they shouldn’t have any business refusing it.”
