Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I raise the issue of housing conditions at the Oliver Bond complex because the House will be aware that it made headline news yesterday when a report was published about the conditions in which the residents live. I congratulate those behind the report and indeed the residents and campaigners who have been working on this for years. The campaign related to the promise of regeneration started ten years ago. We are being told it has been put on hold for four years. This is not just an issue for the local authority. The State bears responsibility for the conditions these people live in. The question is not just about the speed of the proposed regeneration programme but highlights the systemic, State neglect and disregard for Oliver Bond tenants and others, including in Balgaddy, Pearse House, Bernard Curtis House in Bluebell and hundreds of council homes.

Although it was in the media today and yesterday, it is worth going over some of the conditions people live in. One woman who I spoke to today talked about a neighbour, a 27-year-old mother of four, babies and kids up to the age of six. She is pregnant again. She has sewage constantly coming up through her shower onto her bathroom floor. Most neighbours have complained about sinks being blocked. From last March until now, there have been several complaints about blocked sinks that have not been addressed by the council. After a fire in her home, the mother of a woman I know there had to wait for 11 years for her windows to be replaced while the wind and rain howled through her windows.

Another neighbour waited three years for a hall door to be replaced. A 77-year-old woman is still waiting for broken latches to be fixed on her windows. It should interest the Minister of State, as a Green Party Deputy, to hear that these people are absolutely crucified trying to pay heating bills because the wind howls through their properties. There are broken latches, pipes bursting in kitchens and sewage outside the flats. Most of the tenants say the washing machines they purchase last just three to four years because of blockages that wreck the machinery.

A report and a promised regeneration have been put back on hold for four years. This is not just because these buildings, built by Herbert Simms in 1936, have preservation orders and are very beautiful to look at, which is true. It does not explain how tenants have been treated for decades or how issues of mould, damp, sewage, etc., continue. These tenants still have no legally enforceable mechanism to vindicate their rights.

I have one comment. We often hear in this House - we have heard it repeatedly from the Tánaiste but also from other Deputies and the mainstream media - that people should not expect the right to free housing. That "free housing" says much about the nature of the deep class bias against public and social housing in this country. These people are tenants and they pay 15% of their total family income on their rent. This attitude is very ignorant and shows there are vested interests in this society who see property as a way of generating wealth rather than a way of housing families.

I am asking that the Government makes the regeneration of Oliver Bond flats a priority. It should not just put everybody out in the sticks and expect hardly any of them to come back. Tenants were promised they would be temporarily rehoused in a block of apartments on Bridgefoot Street while Oliver Bond was regenerated block by block. That promise has now been taken from under them when the council told them no other tenants will be going into that block. These are huge issues and the Government has to intervene.

See this speech in context