In Ballymun, council tenants with maintenance issues are standing up together

On Monday afternoon, a strong wind whips the long banner held on either end by a fed-up Ballymun resident.

A third joins them in the middle. Together, they steady the flailing sign that pleads with Dublin City Council to “fix our homes”.

The crew of 15 or so people outside the Ballymun Civic Office chant, “Shakespeare, Shakespeare, hear us clear! We won’t wait another year!”

A message for Dublin City Council chief executive Richard Shakespeare.

Word trickles through that the building’s front door has just been locked.  Nobody is coming down to speak with them.

One woman, Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) member Amanda Edwards, holds a picture of the council’s housing chief, Frank d’Arcy.

“We were told in February that he would meet us, but nothing. Where is he?” Edwards says.

Dublin City Council has not yet responded to a question on Wednesday about when d’Arcy will meet with them. 

Council tenants in Ballymun have had maintenance issues ignored for years and even decades, says People Before Profit Councillor Conor Reddy.

CATU is a fairly young organisation but it has gathered older community leaders in Ballymun behind a new campaign to hold the council to account, Reddy said by phone on Thursday.

“We’re drawing on old traditions in Ballymun, but doing something new at the same time,” he says.

Ongoing problems

Before the regeneration of Ballymun – which started almost 30 years ago – social tenants complained of maintenance issues. 

With the post-regeneration housing stock too, many of the same issues come up again and again, Reddy says. 

Mould and damp is a common complaint among tenants in the housing, which is less than two decades old, he says.

Parts of Ballymun have ongoing problems with sewers, drainage and the smells from those, he says.  

“The worst cases, you'd see sewage coming up into people's houses or gardens and either making them sick or making their pets sick,” Reddy says.

Another widespread complaint is about poorly maintained windows and doors, he says. Much of the regeneration housing has wooden features – window frames, door frames. 

People live with draughts and rotten frames, he says. 

The council hasn’t really had a budget for scheduled maintenance, Reddy says. “So a lot of it's become pretty badly rotten.”

Council officials have said they are working to move from largely reactive maintenance – in other words, responding to call-outs – to ongoing planned maintenance for homes based on stock surveys and the expected lifespans of parts.

Not all of the complaints that tenants have though, are around planned maintenance. Some are requests for reactive maintenance – and have been unattended to for years, they say. 

Cathy Hislop has been asking for the council to fix her front door on Coultry Way for 23 years, she says.

When she moved in, council workers planed the bottom of the door too short, she says. When it rains, the water flows under and into her house – and then there’s the constant draught, she says.

“I'm oxygen-reliant and I was keeping the oxygen in the hall, but we had to move it. It couldn't be kept there,” says Hislop. 

D’Arcy, the council’s manager for housing operations, has also said the council doesn’t take in enough rent from its properties to cover all of the maintenance demands and the administration of that work. 

The council is considering raising rents to bring more in for that. 

Door-to-door

CATU members did a door-to-door survey recently in a small corner of Ballymun, said Amanda Edwards on Monday.

That was why the group had gone to the Ballymun Civic Office. They wanted to present the findings, she said.

But soon after they got there, the building was locked down. 

Something which also happened to a small number of CATU members and Cromcastle Court residents who protested outside the Northside Civic Offices ahead of the North Central Area Committee meeting in April.

The survey in Ballymun covered Woodhazel Close, Woodhazel Way and Longdale Terrace, Edwards says.

They tried all the doors, and got responses from about half of them, she says.

Of the 139 houses contacted, 78 reported maintenance issues, she said, including faulty windows or doors, sewage, fencing, and rats.

Other areas in Ballymun are affected too, says Edwards. “Places like Owensilla Terrace and Sandyhill are all having similar problems. It’s so widespread.”

Living with sewage

“Before I get out of my car outside the house, I get the smell of sewage. When people call over, I have to warn them. It’s embarrassing,” said Linda Roddy, by phone on Wednesday.

There’s a manhole just outside her sitting room window on Marewood Crescent. 

It gives off a constant and strong stench of sewage, she says. “It’s all around, but it's particularly bad in our house because we’re on a corner.”

Roddy says that two years ago, she and her husband did their own survey, knocking on almost every home in Marewood to ask about maintenance and the council.

Roddy says most showed damage in their homes. “The repairs that the council were supposed to, but didn’t do.”

“I had breast cancer, and for six weeks I lay on my sofa breathing that sewage smell in the window constantly. My husband has a constant, nauseated feeling,” she says.

Roddy says she and her husband always wanted to buy their home, believing the sewage problem would be fixed. Fourteen years later, she says, they’ve given up on that dream.

They are both around the age of 50, she says, and she is heartbroken by the thought that they may never own a home.

“I could take out my credit union book and show you the loans that I have took out to decorate this house. Myself and my husband have put our hearts and souls into this house, thinking we’d buy it eventually,” she says.

She says she feels that when she pays the council the rent, she is “paying to be poisoned”.

Dublin City Council sent out people in the past to investigate the manhole in her garden with cameras but apparently found no issues, she says.

Yet, the problem persists.

A kilometre and a half from Roddy, Alice Dawson, of Coultry Way, also lives with the same constant smell, she says.

“When we leave our houses early in the morning and come back in the evening, the smell of sewage in your house would be unbelievable. Unless you ran your taps,” Dawson says.

Layers

Dawson says she feels the regeneration of Ballymun was a “failed experiment”. 

After years of broken promises, she is close to losing faith that things will get better for those living here, she says. 

“Teenagers are noisy, we all know that. But young people here have nothing to do. No picture house, no decent coffee shop or somewhere like that to hang around,” she says.

“No shopping centre, SuperValu is gone. The old folks who live in Poppintree have no way of getting their shopping, so they're using the local Centra, which costs them a fortune.”

Reddy sympathises. People don't feel like the promises made are ever delivered, he says.

“You've those vast empty sites, you have the shopping centre being a very big unfulfilled promise, but now you've got layered on top of all of that, the problems of maintenance and housing quality,” he says.

Edwards sees now as a moment for people in Ballymun, young and old, to stand together, she says.

Monday’s protest outside the Civic Office was only the beginning, with more meetings and demonstrations planned in Ballymun in the weeks and months ahead, she says.

Many people with these ongoing problems have been pushing for change, but siloed on their own, she says. “There is power in numbers.”

Reddy points to an ongoing campaign for quality social homes being led by CATU across the city. 

A protest at City Hall outside of this month’s full council meeting brought tenants together from all over the city –  from Emmet Buildings in the Liberties, from Cromcastle Court and Ballymun.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.