Mary Upton (Dublin South Central, Labour)

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. Indeed, I am one of the Deputies mentioned by my colleagues who spoke on this issue in 2005. The situation has not moved forward by even a centimetre in the meantime. Deputy Burton is correct that the people who are suffering as a result of the failure to provide adequate legislation in this area are young people.

I wish to focus on apartment blocks. My constituency of Dublin South-Central is awash with apartments, from Park West through Drimnagh, Crumlin and Walkinstown and into Cork Street and the inner city. All one sees in the constituency are patches of land for which planning permission is being sought or high rise apartments. To confuse matters further, there are new proposals for maximising the city's potential from Dublin City Council which envisage further high rise blocks. We might need more development but the proposals mean more high rise apartments, more management agents and companies and more ripping off of the unfortunate owners of those apartments. There is a great deal of fudge and lack of clarity surrounding the issue of management agents and management companies. The owner of an apartment is often at a complete loss as to who has responsibility for what.

One issue that will become important, and Deputy Ciarán Lynch has mentioned it on a number of occasions, is where local government will allow tenants to purchase their flats. In due course the issue of overall management will have to be addressed. Who will address the issue in that case? Who has responsibility? What management agency and management company will be in place? Will there be more of the same, whereby the fat cats that were mentioned earlier will avail of the system?

When I last spoke in the House on this issue, I put forward a number of proposals that could be addressed and that could bring clarity to the situation. I proposed, for example, that a condition be imposed on developers to complete the apartment complex satisfactorily within a specified period. That condition exists when a development consists of two or more houses so why should it not apply to apartments as well? I also proposed that as soon as an apartment development is completed satisfactorily, ownership of the common parts must be handed over immediately to a management company. A number of speakers have mentioned the problem of those areas staying, in effect, under the control of the developer, effectively disenfranchising the owners of the apartments.

Developers should not be allowed to maintain prolonged control of apartment complex management companies. In Britain, where there is a longer history of the management of apartments, there is a relatively straightforward simple solution in place. It is a solution that could be put in place here.

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