Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I join Deputy Byrne in welcoming the Bill and I thank the Minister of State for attending. I approve of everything the Bill contains and hope it will make a contribution to the proper and efficient regulation of the sector.

The issue I wish to raise was touched upon by Deputy Byrne, namely, anti-social behaviour within the private rental sector and the broader issue of maintenance of private rental properties and the standards they are meant to attain. I acknowledge a point made by the Minister of State, namely, the exponential improvement in the regulation of the private rental sector in recent years. Her Department publishes a spreadsheet on a regular basis which details the number of inspections of private rented property and the consequent number of prosecutions or actions that take place, breaking these figures down by local authority areas across the country. This allows us to see that the number of inspections has greatly increased in recent years, as the Minister of State noted, and also that the number of actions taken in consequence is also increasing. In the same period regulations in respect of the quality of private rental property have been modernised and updated. I very much welcome the two developments and can see the impact they are having on the ground.

Given all of that, nonetheless anything between one fifth and one third of all my constituency work, particularly in respect of anti-social behaviour and standard of living, relates to the private rented sector. Week after week, when I go to community meetings in Dublin Central - I am sure it is the same for Deputy Byrne - I repeatedly hear about the difficulties residents and tenants face in regard to the quality of private rental property and the behaviour that goes on inside such property. People report considerable difficulty in doing anything about it.

I stress that the percentage of properties involved, whether they are reported for tenant behaviour or for appearance and upkeep, is small but not as small as I would like it to be. It is enough that it causes gigantic issues for people who live near or alongside these properties. I offer as illustration two examples I have been involved in in recent months. The first is a property in my constituency at which there was sustained and regular anti-social and criminal behaviour. This required a considerable effort on the part of the city council and the Garda. They could identify quickly enough who the landlord was but they could not discover how to contact him. They had an address and a telephone number but although they wrote and called repeatedly they got no response. Gardaí put in a considerable number of man hours before they could communicate directly with the landlord to tell him that his tenants were causing havoc in the local community and that he would have to take action and responsibility for what was happening. This took a gigantic amount of time on the part of the local Garda inspector. What people had to deal with was not only the sustained anti-social behaviour coming from the property but also its appearance, which was diabolical. They had to try to ensure that the tenants would act on the complaint and that the landlord would care enough about what was going on to hold the tenants accountable for what they were doing. It was enormously difficult to achieve this. Deputy Byrne mentioned a constituent who told her she was seeking to move from the area because of difficulties relating to a property. I encounter that complaint on at least a monthly basis from residents in any given area. I can offer a second illustration. On the North Circular Road in Dublin, which is part of my constituency, there are absolutely beautiful homes and houses. However, over time, a steady number have been degraded and allowed to descend into terrible condition because a small number of landlords have completely abdicated their responsibility towards their property.

I can bookend those negative examples with another, which shows how local authorities are seeking to respond to this problem. I cannot praise enough the recent action taken by Dublin City Council and the Garda who have gone from door to door in an intensive attempt to try to identify how many tenants are in a property and the conditions within it. They ask if there is tax compliance and whether the social welfare payments that go into a property are going into places that are fit for accommodation and meet proper rental standards. However, the amount of activity that has to go into doing this work is unsustainable. As much as I would like the city council to continue doing this kind of work, it is too much to ask of either the council or the Garda. We need to look at the regulations and laws that relate to these two areas of the rental sector and I ask the Minister of State to act on this. I believe she is considering the first, namely, the appearance of residential property and where responsibility for the waste management of a property lies. Time was when, if one wanted to find out if a large house was being rented out, one would look at the number of doorbells on the front door.

One can now establish this by counting the number of bins outside a property and seeing how regularly they are filled to overflowing.

These matters may appear inconsequential but they have a colossal impact on the way people feel about the communities in which they live and on how those communities present themselves to the outside world. The number one issue with which so many of the communities I represent in Dublin Central regularly deal relates to their inability to ensure that a small number of private rented accommodation units - either apartments or houses - are maintained in the way they should be. I am only referring to a small number of landlords in this instance. However, as stated earlier, that number is not as small as we would wish and it is big enough that it is having an utterly disproportionate effect on the quality of life of people who live in all areas of the city centre, particularly those located in the constituency I represent. Deputy Catherine Byrne also referred to this matter.

The second issue to which consideration must be given is antisocial behaviour on the part of tenants. There are two particular difficulties which arise in this regard. The first is the difficulty in contacting landlords when issues emerge. Ultimately, landlords must take an interest in what is happening on their properties and they must be willing to respond to any antisocial behaviour. I deal with a certain Garda inspector who does Trojan work in this area and I am aware that members of the force are obliged to spend hours or days trying to make contact with landlords. In my experience, landlords do two things in cases of this nature. They either ignore repeated efforts to contact them or, if contact is made, they inform the officers involved that the amount of effort being made to contact them is tantamount to harassment.

In some parts of our city, tenants are living in slum conditions and this is having a desperate effect on the people who live nearby. I want to ensure that more will be done in the future to protect the quality of life of those in private rented accommodation and other residents.

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