On North Frederick Street, landlord has packed more bedrooms into house than planning permission allows

At 34 North Frederick Street – the building occupied by Take Back the City in 2018 – the landlord has packed in more bedrooms than the planning permission allows.

In 2020, Dublin City Council granted permission to owner Gracanica Ltd to put six bedrooms in the building, in what looks like a shared-house arrangement.

It’s not clear if Gracanica made the decision to add more rooms to the building and had the works done to put them in, or if someone else did and the building is being sublet.

Plans submitted to the council as part of the application for the 2020 planning permission show generous shared living space, including a kitchen/breakfast room, a lounge/dining room, a reception area, and a study.

However, a recent advertisement on the rental platform Daft.ie included photos of 10 different bedrooms. And a prospective tenant who toured the building recently counted more than the six rooms allowed under the 2020 planning permission.

There is no application on the planning file to convert the communal space or otherwise add extra bedrooms.

This building at 34 North Frederick Street was in the news in 2018, after housing activists were removed from the building by men in black balaclavas, and six of the activists were arrested by gardaí.

The owner at the time was Patricia Ní Griel (otherwise known as Orla McGreal), according to property records.

In 2023 she sold the building to Gracanica Ltd, according to those records, in which she is a shareholder.

Gracanica Ltd has not responded to questions, submitted via the letting agent on Monday.

Those included why permission for the current number of bedrooms hadn’t been applied for, and whether the current configuration allows sufficient living space for the tenants.

The plans approved by the council in 2020 showed bedrooms ranging in size from 11.9sqm to 23.7sqm. Only one bedroom had an en-suite bathroom in those plans.

Former Council planner Kieran Rose says the council should vigorously pursue enforcement action in cases where landlords jam more rooms into a dwelling than their planning permission allows.

It must ensure that the practice doesn’t become normalised, Rose says. “If you allow one person to get away with it the word goes out that you can do this,” he says.

The council’s fire officer needs to inspect the building, Rose says, because the fire certificate issued was granted based on the plans submitted and the current configuration sounds significantly different.

Take Back the City

Take Back the City was an umbrella group of 17 activist groups, including student groups, migrant groups and renters’ action groups.

At the time, activists said the occupation was to highlight urban vacancy and land hoarding, the slum-like conditions of some rental homes in the inner-city and the cost of rent.

Take Back the City called on the council to compulsorily purchase more vacant buildings to turn them into affordable homes.

The owner of 34 North Frederick Street at that time, Patricia Ní Greil, secured a High Court injunction requiring the protesters to leave the building, which the occupiers defied.

Conor Reddy was one of the activists involved in the occupation of 34 North Frederick Street back then, and was arrested at the scene.

Speaking on Tuesday, Reddy, now a Dublin city councillor, said he is surprised it took six and a half years to renovate the building and rent it out.

The application for the injunction to get the occupiers out of the building “referenced plans in court to develop the property”, says Reddy.

What happens next?

Social Democrats Councillor Cat O’Driscoll, who chairs the council’s planning committee, says tenants need to have sufficient living space in shared accommodation.

“If you put in an extra two bedrooms, that is two more places for people to live, but then everybody living there has a lower standard of living,” O’Driscoll says.

Lower housing standards are becoming normalised. “My worry is that the standards impact people’s mental and physical well-being,” she says.

The council has discretion as to whether it pursues a reported breach of planning, says Kieran Rose, the former council planner.

He thinks this sounds like a substantial change, which the council should pursue. “That’s fairly serious,” he says. “It’s not just a minor difference.”

If the council decides to pursue enforcement, it first issues a warning letter that gives the owners a set period in which to comply with the planning permission.

If the owner doesn’t do so, the council can issue an enforcement notice. If the owner doesn’t comply with that, then the council can take them to the district court, says Rose.

The court then decides whether to force the owner to change the building to comply with what was permitted, he says. The court can also issue fines.

But Rose says the owners can also apply to the council for “retention” – basically permission to keep what they’ve done – and the court sometimes takes it into account if they have applied for that. There is also an appeals process for that.

The council should also take into account that 34 North Frederick Street is on the record of protected structures, Rose says.

The kitchen/breakfast room and the lounge/dining room included in the plans were likely the original living rooms, he says. “If you divide them up you are ruining the quality of the protected structure.”

The tenants living in the building need to be supported, says Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor. The conditions in the building sound totally substandard, he says.

There has to be a penalty applied to the owners. “I think that if they get away with this if it goes unpenalised, there is a fear that it will start a race to the bottom,” says Reddy.

Other developers could just build what they want, regardless of what they got planning permission for, he says.

UPDATE: This article was updated at 13.46 on 15 Jan. 2025 to include the information that a prospective tenant who toured the building recently counted more than the six rooms allowed under the 2020 planning permission.