No ground floor access
Dublin's housing crisis hits poorest - an investigation by Roisín
de Rossa
Semi-detached with spacious garden and sea view. Sold.
£5.6million.
Meanwhile there are 6,000 on Dublin City's housing list, 7,500 on
the transfer list, 2,500 on the senior citizen list and 1,254 on
the homeless list. On top there are those who are not registered
at all. Clearly something very wrong.
``Altogether there are about 3,000 homeless in this city,'' says
Sinn Fein Councillor Christy Burke. But last year the Council
built just 123 units, and acquired just 127 houses. ``From 1997 on
the funds used to build or acquire housing will be diverted to
regeneration,'' says Evelyn Hanlon of the Dublin Corporation
Housing Department in a paper on housing in the city.
``There is a housing crisis which is exploding in our faces, which
can only be dealt with at Government level. It is urgent that it
is dealt with. It is a catastrophe,'' says Christy Burke. ``Every
Wednesday evening I have people coming to me desperately seeking
a place. There are 20 requests for every house which comes
available.''
d at his constituency surgery they queue, one distraught person
after another. A mother whose husband took a brain haemorrhage.
They have four kids. They have been in B&B since 1986. Every week
she is in to see the housing department with her two little girls
- for a place for when the husbands comes out of hospital.
ne (not her real name) in a two bedroom flat with four boys of
her own, took her sister, whose husband was beating and
imprisoning her, and her two daughters into the flat to give them
somewhere to get away.
A young couple with three kids under three, in a one room flat,
four years on the waiting list and `cracking up' on the top floor
where she can't let the kids out to play.
d so the queue went into Christy's `advice' evening, and left.
A list of desperation, of unhappiness, of childhoods gnarled and
lost in bitterness and hopelessness.
Where did it start? The crisis has its roots in1985 when Fianna
Fáil started to sell off any public land to the private sector.
Now report after report talks of returning emigrants, of the
peaking of the baby boom, the refugees, the astronomic increases
in house prices and private rented accommodation, and says there
is no land upon which to build the social housing that is so
urgently needed.
But they don't mention the huge developments in the Inner City,
the duplicating shopping centres and the private flats for sale
at £100K a piece. This is the Celtic Tiger on the prowl, looking
to lend money, looking for land to develop, to build houses which
are far beyond the reach of the Corporation to acquire for shared
ownership. The Corpo is limited to £65K and so are the tenants on
wages, or benefits of £130 a week or less.
But there have been changes too. ``Coming out of the drugs
campaign in the Inner City when people took to the streets with
the concerned parents against heroin dealers, it put hope back in
their lives,'' Christy says. ``The days of a developer giving a
couple of lads a job on security have gone. People are making
demands for local employment, and the developers are paying
attention.
``Now you have women at the end of a phone saying `I want you at
that meeting', women who are telling the builders, or the
architects, that they are not happy with the plans, and building
has to stop. And it does stop.
``When the new city Manager, John Fitzgerald, came in, me and Tony
Gregory took him round Dublin City's housing. I believe he was
genuinely shocked. He vowed he would listen to the people on the
ground.''
When 360 flats in Sheriff Street were demolished, 340 were
rehoused in houses. 20 left the area. Is it a sign of things
changing?
There are exciting developments going ahead: the 10 year project
to demolish and rebuild Ballymun, the HARP plan (which provides a
park for picnics outside the Special Criminal Court), the
Docklands Authority which targets 10% of the 1,300 acre site
development for `affordable' houses.
There is the North Inner City Rejuvenation Plan, not to mention
the £4 million earmarked for a prize winning idea of what to do
in the place of Nelson and his column. The face of Dublin is
changing.
Christy has called for a special meeting of the Council which
will take place in September/October. The meeting is to discuss
his proposal that it should be a planning condition of any
further private development that a percentage be given over to
public housing.
``But the housing crisis is so serious that it must now be
addressed by the Minister of Environment, by the Government. It
cannot any longer be left to the council... .But it's the time it
all takes. How long must people wait for the Corporation to
fulfil its obligation to provide suitable and adequate
accommodation for those on the waiting list?''
St Joseph's Mansions - the forgotten flats
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The Celtic Tiger is not stopping here... he's up on the
Expressway. He just ate us for breakfast and left his droppings
behind
Geraldine Toner (Chairperson of Joseph's Mansion/Killarney Street/Avenue
Residents Association)
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In 1982 plans were drawn up to renovate the 138 flats of St
Joseph's Mansions in the heart of Dublin's North Inner City, half
a mile from O'Connell Street. Sixteen years on they are still
waiting. There are 47 flats occupied, with 50 or 60 children
living there. The rest are walled up like dungeons for rats,
housing the memories of the pests which made the lives of the
remaining tenants 16 years of hell.
``We went through hell and high water,'' says Teresa Hart who still
lives in Joseph's Mansions, with her two children, Dessie, 18,
and Gemma, who is nearly six. ``They are not knocking them down.
They're going to make offices or something. I'm not moving out,
away from the area. I'll die first, after all we've been
through''.
``It was the drugs first that ruined it. It was a supermarket.
They came from everywhere. You couldn't get out the front gate.
You were afraid to leave the house. The old people were
terrified.''
``I'd be up at five in the morning to clean the front door brasses
and stuff - in case they thought I was watching them,'' says
Geraldine Toner, Chairperson of the tenants. ``Sure when we
started trying to organise the tenants committee, it was like
MI5. Going to secret meetings, and them following us. I didn't
dare tell anyone that I was pregnant... I kept it secret in case
they thought they'd an advantage. The abuse we took. It was
terrible. Terrible for the kids.''
``It seemed impossible to stop the dealing. The Garda did nothing.
With the Housing Act of 1996, things changed. You could look for
evictions on grounds of anti-social behaviour. But what with
appeals, delays, judicial reviews, the dealers are still not all
gone.
``In 1993 the Corpo came in with £4.4 million to refurbish the
flats. But in 1994, after putting in new windows, without any
locks on them, and putting showers into 16 of the flats, they
left, cause the workmen didn't consider it safe to work there any
longer. And it wasn't. The money disappeared altogether. The
Corpo called it `overrun'. It was spent on other work elsewhere
which had overrun its budget.
Geraldine has a two inch thick file of correspondence. The
`Bertie's and `Jim's and `Brendan's' jump from the page with
monotonous regularity. It isn't my department/my
responsibility... I'm passing your letter onto...
and please don't hesitate to contact me if...''We didn't get very
far with all our representations, meetings, protestations,'' says
Geraldine.
After intensive lobbying of Dublin Corporation, all we have got
is a letter of authority, last August to allow the 25 tenants
with no showers in the flat to wash in the local baths (though
not to swim) for free. Previously it was costing them £3.50 a
week.
Meanwhile the damp in the flats means whole families sleep in the
one room. More than half the kids here are asthmatic. Backdrafts
from the chimney mean that often the fire can't be lit.
There is sewage odour through the complex. With only the kitchen
sink for all washing in grossly overcrowded flats, highly
contagious impetigo is rampant, as is scabies and headlice.
Three kids caught hepatitis which tenants put down to the
excrement on the stairways. One child caught toxoplasmosis
(contracted from contact with human or canine excrement) and is
now blind in one eye. They have no fire escapes, making the flats
a death trap.
Frustrated by so many years of delay the tenants got their own
architect and proposed a redevelopment, converting the flats to
own door housing for all. The Corporation thought it might be a
bit expensive (the scheme was costed at around £6 million).
Instead, an integrated plan for the whole area has gone to the
Government for approval. There is no decision on what should be
done with Joseph's Mansions, though it is planned to rehouse all
the legal tenants in Empress Place next door - when the houses
are built.
``I blame ourselves and I blame the corporation. There are many
genuine and sincere people in the Corpo, but they are wrapped up
in red tape. If it had been a private landlord, the Corpo would
have prosecuted them. But the Corpo itself is exempt.
``We have some great people living in this area, and I don't see
why we should have to live like caged animals, caged by those who
are breaking the law. If people want to take drugs, well let them
do it in privacy. I don't want my child seeing how you do it, not
being able to go out and play in safety.''
Meanwhile there is a generation of frightened abused kids who
have lost a childhood despite the unceasing efforts and courage
of their parents to provide what the government and local
authority have denied them.
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