Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Private Members' motion from Sinn Féin but it horrendous that we are in a situation where we are discussing this issue. While I welcome the "Nightmare to Let" programme, it is a terrible indictment of our society that this situation was there for it to investigate. That programme showed several scenarios. There were private landlords who were registered with the RTB, one was a HAP dwelling and one was particularly bad, with 64 people living in one property on Old County Road. I want to give a bit of background to this last case as I think it is important. It was a hidden hellhole.

In early 2016, there were two commercial premises on the bottom floor of that building. One was a distribution centre for food and the other was a furniture shop. The distribution centre closed in January 2016 and the furniture shop closed about June 2016. All of a sudden, a big sheet of plastic went up, with a sign advertising commercial premises to rent, with a phone number and so on. As it is right next door to my constituency office, we started noticing a few people going in with suitcases. We knew from residents to our rear that work was being done and windows were being opened up at the back of the premises. In December, Councillor Pat Dunne from our office put in a request to the Dublin City Council planning enforcement office for an investigation of that premises to take place, along with residents who were also concerned about it. We got a reply from the enforcement officer in April of this year saying, "Case closed, nothing to see here", even though we continued to see people going in and out.

When the fire officer went into the building, we went out to him and he explained to us what was going on. He said the terrible thing was that, disgracefully, the emergency door at the back was locked, even though there was a light on it. Councillor Pat Dunne asked where the emergency door was and he was told it was on the left of the building. There is a laneway at the back of our constituency office which is overgrown, so nobody goes into it. Councillor Dunne had let in a service officer to check some electricity wires at the back of the laneway only a week before that. He came out white and said he had to show us the laneway, because when he went there, he noticed there was a bricked-up doorway. He did not know it was the emergency door, which was bricked up from the inside by this guy, Andy O'Neill, who quite consciously went in there and tore the place down.

We went in afterwards and there were not even frames on the doors, there were just drilled-in holes in the walls, going from one premises to the next. On the door was written for the students going in there: "Do not talk to anybody", "If anybody asks who you are, you are a student", and "Do not gather outside in the open". We never saw a bin outside the building. There was a situation where the tenants put their waste into a doorway and that man came along, in the evenings or at night, and collected that waste, put it into a trailer and brought it off, so we never saw bins. There was no indication; it was a hidden hellhole.

We know there are a lot more of them around the city. There was a report in the Irish Independentonly last week from Amy Molloy about such properties, revealing more than 40 houses and apartments-----

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