“They’ve no money for windows, but they’ve how much to fill this field with even more apartments and houses?” says Charlene Paget, in Darndale.
On Tuesday morning, Charlene Paget walks with her three-year-old twins along the path beside the “Spine Site” in Darndale.
It’s a long green field, directly to the east of Our Lady Immaculate Church, surrounded by housing developments, that is earmarked by Dublin City Council for building 84 new social homes for older people – a mix of 50 apartments and 34 houses.
The CGI visualisations in the planning file show slick new homes, built from yellow brick, with nice landscaping.
Paget, a single mother, points across the green grass of the Spine Site – which is broken by fresh, swirling tire tracks, left by joyriders – to her house, where she is raising four boys in a home she rents from the council.
“Them broken gutters that are hanging down, they’re like that ages, still waiting for someone to come and fix them,” she says.
Paget moved in four years ago and has been asking since day one for her windows to be fixed, she says. “I have to really force the windows open with my elbow.”
Council workers came out a while back, she says, and painted the window frames, to make them look new, but the issues remained. “What they did was they took the lazy way out.”
A gap in her back door lets in rainwater constantly, she says, and it soaks her kitchen floor. Another issue she has been asking to be remedied.
“They’ve no money for windows, but they’ve how much to fill this field with even more apartments and houses?” Paget says.
The same contrast can be seen across the city: council tenants who've struggled for years and years with poor housing conditions the council can't or won't fix, find themselves looking out draughty windows at sites where the state has found plenty of money to build brand-new homes.
In Inchicore, construction cranes tower over the rising concrete bones of the council's An Droichead Órga housing development on Emmet Road, which will cost hundreds of millions of euro to build. Across the road, tenants in the council's Tyrone Place flats have long complained of damp and mould and other problems.
Over in the Liberties, residents of Emmet Buildings have been hoping for renovations and fixes too. Meanwhile, some are hearing about the Land Development Agency's plans progressing for the massive Pear Tree Crossing housing development just next door, and feeling left behind.
In Coolock, tenants at Cromcastle Court last summer expressed anger as a new cost-rental development progressed nearby while they waited for regeneration of their own homes.
Dublin City Council has acknowledged that its older housing stock has more maintenance problems, noting that more than 80 percent of its homes were built before building regulations were introduced in 1992.
And it has long said that it wasn't taking in enough in rents to properly manage its housing.
The council took in €110 million in rents in 2024, but in the same year it shelled out €180 million on maintaining and administering the 29,000 or so homes it owns in the city, according to a report to councillors in March 2025.
“I think we need to look at a complete revision of the rent scheme and what that would mean,” said Frank d’Arcy, the council’s director of housing operations, at the finance committee that month.
And, indeed, in the council's budget for this year, proposed by council executives and approved by councillors, there was an increase in rents for council tenants.
The idea is that this extra revenue for the council can be used to fund maintenance work on its housing. In Darndale, Paget says she’ll believe when she sees it.
At the council's September monthly meeting, Councillor Michael Pidgeon of the Green Party said he supported the rent increases.
"I think there is a direct line between the inadequate conditions faced in Dublin City Council social housing and the low amounts that have been raised by the rents for maintenance over the years," he said. "I appreciate not everyone accepts that or agrees with that, but that's my own view."
At the meeting, People Before Profit Councillor Conor Reddy asked, in writing, "how the additional revenue generated by the April 2026 changes to the Differential Rent Scheme has been spent to date and how it will be spent for the remainder of 2026".
In response, a written answer from the council's chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, set out a long list of goals, from the full regeneration and refurbishment of existing flat complexes, to planned maintenance and energy efficiency works to existing homes, and more.
"In 2026, DCC's housing planned maintenance team will spend c.€48.3 million on improving our housing stock," his answer says. "This is an increase in spend of €11.2 million from the €37.1million of budget available in 2025."
Even as the council moves forward with its plans to bring in more in rents, and spend that on fixing up its existing housing stock, some councillors continue to campaign to roll back the rent increases altogether.
The new Differential Rent Scheme took effect on 6 April, increasing the proportion of assessable income charged to a household's primary earner from 15 to 18 percent, and increasing the maximum weekly contribution from other adult earners from €21 to €40.
Dublin City Council had previously estimated that the changes would increase the average household rent for its tenants by around €22 per week, from €83 to approximately €108.
In March, before the increase went into effect, the net rent arrears balance was €35.4 million, according to the chief executive's written reply to another question from Reddy at the 7 September meeting of the full council.
Rent arrears rose in each subsequent month up through July, the most recent month given, when it reached €38.1 million, the numbers showed.
At the monthly meeting, Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan tabled a motion to review the rent increases.
"Households here in Dublin are facing a cost-of-living crisis, and we need to do all we can to reduce that burden," Doolan said, describing whole blocks of council flats as "riddled with damp".
Pidgeon, of the Green Party, who supported the rent increases to pay for more maintenance, said the motion "calls for a review, which I think is reasonable".
The rent increases affect council tenants as well as tenants renting in the private sector with help from the HAP and RAS rent subsidies, Doolan said at the meeting.
“HAP and RAS tenants in the precarious private rented sector are paying more rent and will never benefit from the promised maintenance program the rent increase is supposed to fund,” Doolan said. “I believe it is unacceptable that these tenants are now forced to pay more rent with little or no hope of improved housing conditions."
Laoise Neylon
On Monday, the council's housing committee voted 11–8 for a motion from Reddy calling for the council to reverse the hikes, and for alternative revenue sources to be investigated.
Opponents argued the increases are worsening hardship, particularly for overcrowded households and tenants awaiting maintenance, with some families facing increases of up to €150 a week.
Council management defended the scheme as a fair way to fund additional maintenance and housing staff, while saying protections exist for low-income tenants.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
"There is just a ridiculous overconcentration of short-term accommodation," in the Blackpitts and Newmarket Square area, says Sinn Féin Councillor Ciaran Ó Meachair.
Changes to the timeline are particularly sensitive because of wider concerns about a lack of council investment in the north-west of the city.
"If you ask, you'll be told this is part of the BusConnects project, we can't touch it until then."
Will they be gone? Should they be kept?
