Dublin City Flat Complex Retrofit and Regeneration: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-06
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Aengus Ó Snodaigh (SF), Dublin South-Central

It should acknowledge that it has increased the rent in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. It should also acknowledge the increase in rent is for substandard accommodation, pure and simple. These flats are substandard and people know it. They are not fit, in some cases, for human habitation. I have had many cases over the years where residents have come to me about the level of mould and damp, with water running down their walls, not the windows but their walls, and into sockets, making it dangerous to live in. The floor gets saturated and the furniture they have starts to warp and attract mould and damp. The Minister of State would not expect to live in that, yet the State expects people to live in those conditions.
It needs to end now. The Government needs to reverse the decision taken on Oliver Bond House and not just that. It needs to accelerate all of the other ones. The communities have spent time and effort and have had consultation after consultation, yet they are getting knocked back. Communities will not continue to engage in those consultations. Is that what the Minister of State wants? Does he want to break the communities and separate them around the city, as has happened in the past, because of the delays? Blocks are detenanted, people are moved out of the community and they are no longer part of it. They are elsewhere. Is that the intention? Then, all of a sudden, the Government has a greenfield site it can build public-private apartments on. That is the wrong approach.
These communities are proud. They are the best people in the world, yet we have allowed them to continue to live in unfit accommodation with all of the other pressures these communities are under. We all know about the antisocial and criminal behaviour of people selling drugs in many of these complexes. That needs to end, and it needs to end now.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-06/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:54+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-06