W2B-018 Flats - Consent-0.txt
The Flat Trap
Tens of thousands of people in Ireland are living in dangerous and unsanitary conditions, unaware of their rights or too afraid to exercise them
Cormac O'Keeffe and Dearbhla Regan report.

In January 1994 two young men died in a fire at 110 North Circular Road, Dublin. The property had been converted into a multiple-occupancy residence prior to the implementation of the Landlord Act (1963). Dublin Corporation had no reason to inspect it, let alone know of its existence. The landlord had crammed sixteen bedsits into this three-storey house. The windows were barred and there was no fire escape.

Following the tragedy Joe Costello TD (Labour) conducted a survey of the 166 houses on the North Circular, and found a "very serious deficiency in safety standards." 77% had no alternative means of exit, in breach of the Fire Services Act (1981), which obliges landlords to take reasonable precautions against fire and ensure safety in the event of fire.

Mr Costello was particularly critical of the performance of the local authorities and dismissed enforcement of legislation governing the private sector as "wholly inadequate." Noel Carroll, Dublin Corporation PR Officer denies such claims. "Fire Prevention Officers are performing hundreds of inspections annually." However, a maximum of thirty notices are being served every year. Moreover, the Corporation presently provides only 24 part-time Fire Prevention Officers and 27 part-time Health Officers to regulate the thousands of properties actually registered as privately rented accommodation in Dublin.

Costello's survey concluded that minimal policing of the private rented sector has led not only to a general situation of unacceptably substandard housing conditions, but to a uniform lack of awareness among the tenant population of their entitlement to basic health and safety standards. Acting Chief Environmental Health Officer Tom Carroll, however, denies the allegations. "Housing regulations are in the main being complied with." He also rejects persistent Student Unions'accusations that local authorities are not fulfilling their statutory obligations and that landlords, when found to be in breach of regulations, are not being fined.

There is an even more fundamental inadequacy with existing legislation. The Corporation is only obliged to inspect registered properties and those converted after 1963. Mr Costello, however, stated, "I believe only a fraction of Dublin's landlords are actually registered as such." The law cannot be brought to bear upon the huge percentage of non tax-paying landlords who are renting out potential death-traps to students, single parents and the unemployed.

"Totally unorganised and totally uncontrolled," is Costello's polite description of the free-for-all that is Dublin's private sector. "The DoE must bring in statutory legislation obliging landlords to register with their local authorities," he stated. "As it is, what happened at North Circular Road can and will happen again." Without uniformly enforced registration, the introduction of The Housing Regulations Act (1993), which requires landlords to provide a rent book and maintain certain minimum standards of repair, is useless.

Health and fire regulations are widely disregarded in Dublin. Fire escapes are not part of the city's infrastructure. Burnt-out houses are. Hundreds of tenants are being cramped into dilapidated Georgian houses partitioned by plywood, despite a government warning that, "Three story buildings with large numbers of tenants are death-traps when they possess only the same number of fire exits they possessed prior to conversion to multi-unit occupancy." In Drumcondra recently a young man jumped three stories from one of these houses to escape a fire. He broke both his legs.

Such conditions are regarded as standard, rather than exceptional, among tenants renting privately in Dublin. We spoke to some of them at random about their experiences.

David lives at the top of one of the multi-occupied Georgian houses in Leeson Street converted after 1963. To escape a fire he would have to jump four flights onto concrete, or a fire-engine could bull-doze through a garden wall to reach him. His landlord, who is registered, collects over £ 400 pw on one property alone. David called Fire Prevention to be informed that the landlord was only obliged to provide a smoke alarm or a fire extinguisher. A month later, David was given a fire extinguisher that wouldn't put out a cigarette.

Most tenants we interviewed agreed that health regulations are also of minor concern to the majority of Dublin's landlords. A certain wealthy and reputable landlady owns several houses in Lower Baggot Street. Deirdra, a potential tenant, went to view some of her flats recently.

Legally, there must be at least two doors separating a bathroom from a kitchen. In at least two of these flats the toilet is actually in the kitchen, which is itself attached to the living room. 'Toilet' is a generous word. These port-a-loos don't even reach the ceiling, and the shower is in there as well. The landlady is charging £ 43 pw per person. From mid-September she will have hundreds of students queuing outside her doors.

Students in Dublin are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. The vast majority of them are living in dangerously substandard accommodation. They provide a constant demand for housing, but as a transient body are also virtually powerless to demand tenant rights. With Dublin's chronic scarcity of habitable accommodation, students are an ideal market for unscrupulous landlords seeking to make a quick turn-over profit, because they can always be relied upon to grab substandard flats at ludicrously inflated prices.

"Competing for accommodation in a situation of excess demand, students cannot afford to be assertive. Very few even know they have rights," according to UCD's Welfare Officer, Stephanie Leahy. Ms Mary Higgins, manager of Threshold in Dublin, said, "The problem is fear. With no security of tenure, young people are afraid that if they complain they will be evicted. They probably would be." She reported a further significant increase in the number of illegal evictions passed last year. Tom Carroll, also admitted that tenants were unwilling to co-operate with inspections for fear of provoking the landlord.

This state of affairs applies across the board and in Northern Ireland as well. In towns facing explosive increases in the student population, such as Athlone, even minimal attempts to provide campus housing and remove students from exploitation have met with vehement opposition from private landlords. "Students here are still looking for somewhere half-decent to live at the end of March," according to USI News Editor at Sligo University, Catherine Kearney. Meanwhile, twenty-three students were forced to share a house separated from each other by plywood walls.

"The unregulated private sector is an unacceptable and glaring area of abuse," Costello concluded. While he welcomes recent reforms, he is "extremely suspicious" that the governmental will to introduce obligatory registration actually exists, despite the support voiced in favour of it by Mr. Emmett Stagg, Minister for Housing.

At the August launch of their Challenges and Change report, Threshold were also extremely critical of the "unevenness" in the implementation of The Housing Regulations Act). Like Mr Costello, Ms Higgins was particularly critical of the local authorities, which she described as "moribund and underfunded." She does not believe that new regulations will do anything to mitigate the situation as long as the lack of policing that has characterised the system to date continues.

"In housing matters generally, there should be someone looking to the public good," Higgins stated. As it is, the wolf is at the door in the guise of a laissez-faire policy regarding the behaviour of opportunistic and corrupt landlords.

Deaths such as those on the North Circular Road are not accidental. They are preventable by the statutory installation of cheap and simple fire provisions. The government, even more so than the landlord, must be called to account for turning a blind eye to the exploitation of low-income groups. To date, the government has been succumbing to the implicit threat that if regulations were rigidly enforced, landlords would sell out and send this state-dependent body of tenants out of their hovels and onto the streets.
