Slum home changes may take up to three years
DUBLIN City Council said it will have a report on housing standards – but one minister has admitted that some improvements could take up to three years. Deputy Chief Executive Brendan Kenny apologised yesterday following RTÉ’s Prime Time exposure of the horror accommodation where tenants were living.
Junior Housing Minister Damien English branded what was revealed on the programme as ‘disgraceful treatment of people’.
Mr Kenny apologised over a property in Crumlin, where 64 people were housed, despite warnings of endangerment to life, saying the council ‘holds its hand up’ and that this should not have happened.
Mr Kenny told yesterday’s News At One on RTÉ that the council is dealing with 25 cases of overcrowding. He said the ‘system needs to be fixed’ and gave a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ that complaints would be taken on board in the future.
‘The Government needs to introduce legislation and regulation to provide serious penalties. If a landlord was to be fined €1million, €500,000 or even €100,000, or if we had the power to injunct landlords, that will stop it rather than having to inspect every property in the city. At the moment we are dealing with 25 different cases. If people check back on the newspapers over the past 12 months, there have been a number of other cases.’
Junior Minister English was forced to admit that there will be no improvement in the regulation of ‘slum accommodations’ until 2020 following the Prime Time exposé.
The six-month investigation found as many as 64 people crammed into accommodation, as well as three multiple occupancy buildings with more than 120 tenants which had to be closed after an inspection by the fire service.
Speaking after the programme was aired, Minister English said: ‘I was surprised. This is absolutely disgraceful and it’s a disgraceful treatment of people, and the way those tenants have been abused.
‘We made the decision a number of months ago to ring fence increased funding from 2018 onwards to get to a stage in a number of years’ time that we are inspecting 25% of properties. The target is that by 2020 we’ll be at that stage, but if we can find increased resources we can do it earlier,’ he added.
The RTÉ investigation, which was broadcast on Thursday night, showed how more than half of rental homes in almost every county are not meeting the required standards when inspected.
Dublin City Councillor Eilis Ryan, of the Workers’ Party, in Dublin’s north inner city, has called for City Council CEO Owen Keegan to resign. ‘There is absolute clarity each local authority is responsible for regulation of the private rented sector – meaning ultimate accountability lies with the CEO; in this instance Owen Keegan,’ she said.
Last year, the Irish Daily Mail revealed Freedom of Information documents from Dublin City Council which show the disgraceful conditions that unscrupulous landlords are forcing families to live in, which led to 1,000 enforcement notices being issued in Dublin in the first half of the year.
‘We are dealing with 25 cases’