Leaks plague residents in a Ballymun apartment complex

Janine Melia was supposed to be in work at the airport last Thursday. But she had been up all night, anxious.

“Sitting in the dark with a head torch,” she said, the following morning.

Water had dripped down from the round light and from the extractor fan in the bathroom of her home on the second-floor of The Hampton apartment block at Santry Cross in Ballymun.

On Thursday morning, a black bucket still sat on the white-tile floor below the freshly stained ceiling. A metal saucepan was angled on a cabinet top.

Melia doesn’t know for sure what caused the leaks, she says. Neither do many of her other neighbours in the complex, who have also in recent times returned home to pools of water.

Valerie Hayes, who lives in an apartment across the car park in another block, The Turnpike, had water seeping into her flat in mid-November, she says.

Next door in The Hampton, Jordyn Murray – a more recent arrival to the blocks – has grown more and more worried, she says, about the water stain spreading by the window in the corner of her living room.

One reason why Melia, Hayes, and others have been left casting around amongst themselves for explanations is that they are social tenants.

Dublin City Council hasn’t told them anything, they say. And, they have no right to eyes and ears on the OMC, the company controlled by flat owners, which in turn hires a property manager to keep up the common areas of the building.

Sinn Féin TD and housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin says that for safety reasons, all landlords should communicate clearly to their tenants if there are building defects and what those defects are.

“Social landlords should be providing information,” said Ó Broin, who has also authored the 2021 book Defects: Living with the Legacy of the Celtic Tiger.

There is a wider problem with tenants not having a seat on OMCs too, he said. “This is always a problem, it’s not just with defects. Tenants have no rights at all in these circumstances.”

Hayes agrees. It’s not as if all the tenants need to be at OMC meetings, she says. “Even to nominate one person to go and take notes or whatever.”

Meanwhile, some tenants’ frustration with leaks has been compounded by poor conditions inside their flats, which weren’t refurbished up to standard when the council bought them under the tenant-in-situ scheme – and the grimy state of the common areas.

Dublin City Council needs to be a lot more pro-active in getting to the bottom of issues for its tenants, says Conor Reddy, a People Before Profit councillor who has been trying to help tenants in the blocks. “You would expect the council to be held to a higher standard.”

Dublin City Council hasn’t responded to several queries about conditions in its flats in the blocks, with some sent last Thursday and others on Tuesday morning.

Legacy issues

Basil Good, a director of Santry Cross Management Limited, the owner management company (OMC), said that apartment owners at Santry Cross are dealing with the fall-out from shoddy Celtic Tiger-era construction.

He joined the OMC in August 2021, as he is involved in a commercial unit on the ground floor, he said.

They have in his time fixed a litany of fire-safety issues in what was an uninsurable complex, he said.

Issues mainly stemmed from poor compartmentalisation – and the fire alarm system was out of date and not working, he says. “There was a long list of things.”

“We had to spend an awful lot of money on making the building safe from a fire point of view in order to get insurance. So that was our number one priority,” says Good. “It wasn’t fire complaint, it is now fire compliant.”

Good said that they have now started some work to fix leaks. “Some of the panels have been sealed, some of them haven’t yet,” he says. “Unfortunately, we have taken over a bit of a nightmare.”

On Tuesday, by phone, Hayes – a long-time resident who used to be a private renter and is now a social tenant in the same flat – said she hadn’t been told any of this. And what if a fire had started? “God forbid.”

Comparing notes

Late last Thursday morning, a group of women gathered out in the cold of the long car park between the Hampton building and the other blocks that make up the Santry Cross complex.

The buildings, built by the now-bust construction giant Pierce Contracting as part of the Ballymun regeneration, were marketed in 2004 as “top end” for the city – and with the benefit of tax breaks for new owners.

These days, they are not top end. An effort to contact a former director of Pierce Contracting was unsuccessful at time of publication.

“I came home one evening and there’s water coming out of the lights,” said Valerie Hayes, who has lived in The Turnpike for 20 years. “Underneath my flooring in the spare bedroom and down the wall.”

It was the first leaks like that she had had, she says – making her wonder if it related at all to work done on the roof.

A property manager told her it was from the apartment above, she says.

Melia, a big warm coat wrapped around her and a steaming mug of tea in hand, says maintenance workers said the same about her leak.

“They said it was the apartment above me,” she says. The leak the night before is just the latest for her.

Water had also seeped in before through a hole in the living room wall beside the living room window, which has since been patched up by the council, she says. It also drips down the corner of her hot press near the boiler.

In her flat in The Hampton, Murray pulls back the edge of a curtain hanging in front of a long window to show a sepia stain at its edge. When it rains, the leak worsens.

Beads of water have also gathered along the metal window frames.

Melia says her health has suffered since she moved into her flat. She was hospitalised last year for a week, she says, and diagnosed with adult-onset asthma.

“I’ve never had lung problems in my life,” she says. “I always played sports. I coached the Irish netball team. I can’t even walk up a flight of stairs.”

Good, the director of Santry Cross Management, says they are hoping to cover repair costs through the government’s planned defects remediation scheme once that is in place. “We’re hoping to get some funds out of that.”

It is unclear how long all the repairs will take.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said that it expects legislation for the scheme to be published in the first half of 2025, and that the Apartment and Duplex Defects Remediation Scheme will be in place shortly thereafter.

Dublin City Council didn’t respond to queries as to whether it was aware of structural issues in the blocks when they bought the flats and what condition surveys it had done.

Inside the flats

Both Melia and Hayes used to be private-renters. The council bought their homes and they became social tenants, under the tenant-in-situ scheme, they say.

The council didn’t fully refurbish their homes, though.

The council paid €245,000 for Melia’s flat in September 2023, says the property price register. But she has a litany of complaints about the conditions.

She is worried about her boiler, she says. When her home was a private rental, the boost button didn’t work.

A maintenance worker for the landlord said he had done a quick cheap fix to bypass the problem, she says. “That’s something I’d be nervous about.”

The switch has melted on the heater in her bedroom. “I’m actually afraid to use that.”

She uses a gas heater in the living room to keep warm, she says.

Melia crouches inside her en-suite bathroom in front of the sink. “There’s no thing here,” she says, pointing to a gap where the U-bend should be.

The end of the pipe into the wall is stuffed with tissue. “The smell of sewerage coming out of it was absolutely vile,” she says.

She has been onto the council repeatedly to ask them to fix it, she says. “When they bought this, this was like this.”

And, “This is the presses I’m currently working with,” she says, now in the kitchen. She opens one peeling cabinet door and it drops to the floor. “They told me to put a screw in it.” Someone came to fix it, photographed it, and hasn’t come back, she says.

Hayes meanwhile – who signed over to be a council tenant in February 2023, she says – has just one storage heater in the apartment in her hall. “Do you know what I do? I use my fur coat, I call it, and my pajamas. And a duvet.”

“You’d be warmer in a morgue, I swear to God,” she says. An electrician for the council came and said they had to order heaters for her, she says – but that hasn’t arrived yet.

Dublin City Council didn’t respond to queries as to why they hadn’t brought all the flats  up to standard.

Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor who is advocating for the tenants, says he is struggling to get answers from the council as to why it isn’t doing essential maintenance work.

“The council is always slow at maintenance but it seems especially slow in this case,” he says.

He can’t understand the lack of communication with tenants either, and he has submitted formal questions for the next full council meeting in January, he says, to try to get answers for them.

“There needs to be a much deeper look at the problems across the complex,” says Reddy, and “a serious look at what can be done to fix them”.

Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin TD, says the council can claim money from central government for remedial works on homes that it buys under tenant-in-situ as long as the total price for the purchase and works is under a certain cap.

“With tenant in situ the local authority has a fair amount of flexibility if the price is below the unit price ceiling,” he says.

Melia says that if the council would agree to renovate fully, she would find somewhere temporary to live. “I’ll move out to my ma’s,” she says.

Hayes wants to know who is going to pay to repair the water damage in her social home, she says. “I want to see who is paying for the damage. For the paint and all that.”

Council tenants are generally expected to pay themselves to maintain their homes, more so than private renters.

But, “you only have what you have to do it up”, she says. “I certainly haven’t got the money to do paint to do up the apartment again and my flooring.”

Says Murray: “You can see in people’s houses. They’ve been done up, they’re painted. They have nice floors and that. And they’re just getting absolutely wrecked.”

The common areas

On top of the structural defects, and the conditions inside flats, residents in the Santry Complex also complain of grimy common areas.

In the entrance of The Hampton on Thursday, the fire alarm was beeping. The lift inside was dirty. It breaks all the time, say Melia and Murray as they squeeze in.

Tenants also complain about a lack of security, and broken street lights, and teenagers breaking in.

Kids scrawl on the walls of the landings as soon as they’re painted fresh, Hayes says. A few weeks back, kids climbed onto a roof and hurled cement blocks down below, says Hayes.

There used to be security on-site, says Hayes, back when she moved in. “An old fella with two German shepherds.” Bring that back, she says.

Sometimes, poor maintenance of common areas in apartment buildings can be down to owners not paying their service charges.

Financial statements for the OMC for the year ending April 2022 do note an operating deficit. “Debtors in the company now exceed balance sheet reserves and the company does not have sufficient cash to meet it’s obligations,” they say.

“These conditions indicate uncertainty which may cast doubt about the company’s ability to continue of as a going concern,” they read.

But, it also says, “the directors are working with a new management team and have considered the company’s future earnings and costs and all relevant aspects of the company’s financing position, including its ability to generate positive cash flow. On that basis, the directors are satisfied that the going concern basis is appropriate”.

Good, an OMC director, says that payment of service charges is now not an issue and most property owners in the complex are paying. There’s a diverse group of owners and some are bigger owners with many flats and they are good at paying, he said.

The OMC has been working to improve maintenance of the common areas, he says. Within his time, it hired new property managers. It is meeting with them soon to stress expectations, he said.

Access Property Services, the property managers for the complex, didn’t respond to queries sent by email about the maintenance of common areas.

In the car park, talk among the women gathered turns to the new apartment blocks planned for the big green spaces to the west of the Santry Cross blocks.

“Fair enough, people need them,” says Murray. “But I mean, are they going to end up the same as us? Or are we going to be left rotting?”

Hayes grins. They could always welcome their neighbours, and hang out for a while – and, you know, warm up at least, she says.

“I hope we can be friends, who live over there,” she says, laughing and shivering.