What’s the best way to tell area residents about plans for a new asylum shelter nearby?
The government should tell communities directly about plans for new asylum shelters, some activists and politicians say.
The Department of Housing has vetoed the council’s designs for the Herbert Simms-designed Pearse House in the south inner-city.
Debate so far has been around the current costs of maintenance, which tenants may be asked to pay more, and the fairness of rent rises for those in poor conditions.
The council’s current target is to knock and build new social homes on the site in the heart of the south-inner city by early 2028.
At one site, on Bonham Street, 57 “rapid-build” homes took almost four years to build and cost 51 percent more than originally agreed, an auditor’s report says.
Last year, tenants in Drimnagh and Cabra said they had been barred from communal facilities. Now, tenants in a new Liberties complex are finding the same.
Solicitor Peter Boyle said he thinks many more tenants have strong cases they could take against the council, based on the mould and damp they are living with
Erika Dunne’s six-year-old son Ben has autism, a learning disability, and is nonverbal, and she needed a home she could adapt to keep him from hurting himself.
The council’s outgoing head of housing, Coilín O’Reilly, said that isn’t going to happen.
“How do kids integrate in a community?” says Niamh Fox, one of the residents. “It’s just not right.”
There are wider questions, too, about who has access to the many communal amenities at The Davitt, at what price – and how that fits with planning rules.
Unlike private-rental tenants, there’s no independent body for tenants renting directly from the council to complain to if their landlord isn’t meeting its obligations.
These were two of the issues that Dublin city councillors discussed at a meeting of their Central Area Committee on Tuesday.
Get our latest headlines in one of them, and recommendations for things to do in Dublin in the other.