Each attack has added to the cost, and time, that it takes to move a household in, said a council official.
When Conor Reddy, the People Before Profit (PBP) councillor for the Finglas-Ballymun area, asked for a count of xenophobic attacks on social homes that were soon to be allocated, council officials responded listing 23 incidents.
That's over 12 months, according to a report from Dublin City Council staff. This has included “graffiti or property damage", the report says.
He'd asked "for a report on the impact of racist and xenophobic attacks on the renovation and letting/reletting of social homes".
Reddy had also asked about the scope of damage to the homes, repair costs, and whether such attacks triggered withdrawals of tenancies or housing offers.
It's hard to quantify the costs of repairs, given some properties were mid-repair already and other cases are still live, said the response.
But, “For those cases where repair costs have been identified and recorded, the total expenditure attributable to damage and vandalism amounted to €60,005,” the report said.
The attacks have meant some homes sat empty for longer than otherwise, it said. One home was damaged three different times, stalling “use of the property by 180 days", said the report.
By council area, the largest number of cases of xenophobic damage to social homes was in the council's North West Area – which includes Finglas and Ballymun – where 12 homes have been vandalised over the past 12 months.
Eight of those homes were in Finglas, the report says, where "there was one formal surrender of a tenancy directly related to these incidents".
Reddy, the councillor for the area, and Dessie Ellis, a Sinn Féin TD for Dublin North-West, which covers the area, say the big-picture solution is to speed up delivery of social homes to get more people off the housing list faster, to counter narratives that seek to divide.
Until that happens, the council could grow its local authority integration team so they can help all people from immigrant backgrounds, not just newcomers, who are eligible to access social housing to bond with their neighbours, said Mary Gilmartin, a geography professor at Maynooth University whose research focuses on migration and mobility.
“They are small, and their remit may well not extend to some of the people who are accessing social housing,” she said.
At the moment, local authority integration teams focus on helping sanctuary-seekers settle in.
In response to queries about the attacks, and what it can do to prevent future ones, a spokesperson for Dublin City Council said it’s committed to creating a city in which everyone feels welcome, valued “and able to participate in the social, cultural and economic life”.
It’s working with a host of community groups, residents, non-profits and government agencies to realise that vision and support communities affected by emerging issues, they said,
“Finglas Area Office engages with a series of youth clubs, sports teams, older persons associations as well as environmental groups to run community events which have an inclusion focus,” the spokesperson said.
Dublin City Council's most recent update on its housing projects shows it expects to add 232 new social homes in the North West Area this year, just 1 next year, and 186 the year after.
In 2029, there's a bump to 1,404 expected homes – a mix of social, cost rental, and affordable purchase.
The social housing lists – the main and transfer lists – for areas E and D, which cover a much wider area but also take in Ballymun and Finglas, amounted to about 6,900 households, as of June last year.
Meanwhile, tensions around public housing allocation to people who weren’t born in Ireland has been running high in Finglas and Ballymun in recent months.
Things flared up again in mid-summer when a National Party representative for the area organised a protest outside a home allocated to a family – whose members were born in Somalia – who’d moved there after a period of homelessness.
At the time, Abdi Farhan Hassan, a member of the Somali community, said that the protest gave the family a lot of agita.
Then, weeks later, independent Councillor Gavin Pepper, sought the city’s data on nationality of people on social housing lists.
His position, he said on the Niall Boylan podcast, is that “you should have to be an Irish citizen before you're entitled to social housing”.
Only immigrants who have permanent residence status qualify to apply for social housing and join the list. Those people have typically lived here for a few years already.
Pepper has voiced discontent about the idea that some people with an immigration history are more likely to be assessed as homeless and, like anyone else in that situation, would then be prioritised for a social home.
Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor, said immigrants are more likely to end up living in homeless shelters during an affordable housing crisis in a country they weren’t born in.
Not having a lot of contacts in the labour market, they can also end up in low-paid jobs which means they have to sign up to public housing lists for a shot at landing a permanent place, he said.
Focusing on people’s nationalities in a diverse city is not going to help cool off tensions in Finglas and Ballymun, Reddy said.
Though he likes to stress that people who vandalise social homes in his constituency with xenophobic intent make up a tiny portion of those who live in Finglas and Ballymun, he said.
But "unfortunately this is what makes the headlines and gives a distorted picture of the community that we are", Reddy said.
Pepper, the independent councillor, did not respond to queries emailed on 4 November, asking about his reaction to reports of a higher number of incidents of racist and xenophobic vandalism in Finglas than in other parts and his response to the suggestion that his public remarks might not contribute to tackling the problem.
But Ellis, Sinn Féin TD for Dublin North-West, said he knew of racist vandalism in the area happening long before anti-immigrant rhetoric went mainstream.
He’s been involved in politics since the 1990s, and has seen it all, he said by phone, last week.
But he agrees that it’s been turbocharged in recent years as some try to sell a simplistic cause for the affordable housing crisis, Ellis said.
“The easiest thing to do is to blame everything on immigration, blame it on people coming into the country, which is absolute nonsense,” he said.
And “social media has a lot to answer” for that, too, said Ellis.
He understands the frustration of living with your parents for years, languishing on social housing lists, and growing resentful of the idea that people on the homeless lists can be homed faster.
But the solution, he said, is to grow the public housing supply so everyone can be served. “There's just not enough social and affordable housing being built,” said Ellis.
At a recent lecture organised by the UK-based Housing Studies Association (HSA), Sophie Gordon, associate director of communications at FrameWorks UK – a communications research non-profit — revealed the upshot of their focus-group research on attitudes towards social and affordable housing.
It shows that alongside “individualism”, fear of supply scarcity is one factor causing people to see lowering demand as the solution, she said.
In their focus groups, Gordon said, those who voiced concerns about shortage of supply, “tended to assume a fixed and finite supply of homes, and so directed their attention instead to increased demand as being the problem”.
For those with that mindset, any extra request for housing comes at someone else’s expense, she said.
“Fatalism” was another school of thought, Gordon said. The idea that the housing crisis is too grand and complicated to ever fully tame, so it’s best to lean on reducing demand.
“The challenge with fatalism is that it normalises the idea that taking action is pointless,” she said.
One way to communicate to people with housing concerns is to frame messaging in a way that won’t trigger a retreat to those mindsets, she said.
Remind people of something they already know about their own lives. That “their home is integral to their own quality of life. And to encourage them to see it that it applies to everyone,” Gordon said.
“This framing, connecting homes and health, it builds understanding and in turn it also impacts people's support for change,” she said.
They found that pitching the need to build more social homes on grounds of economic perks alone doesn’t get people behind the idea as much as when they are asked to think about it as a vehicle to boost people’s health, Gordon said.
Use metaphors to establish a home as “as a need that we all share, collectivising rather than leaving so much space for individualism to come to the fore”, she said.
Finally, she said, fill the gaps in people’s understanding of what lies at the roots of affordable housing crisis.
“Say something like: since the '80s, successive governments have largely relied on private developers to take responsibility for building social homes, but social housing providers of all kinds have lacked access to the resources and powers needed to come close to meeting our need,” Gordon said.
This last tip might sound like a given, “but it’s the one that we really can’t take for granted", she said.
If the point isn’t made, that’s how some come to believe the narrative that seeks to pin blame on immigration, Gordon said.
Meanwhile, Ellis, the Sinn Féin TD for Dublin North West, said the issue in Finglas is worsened by policing failures that reassure people who are carry out xenophobic attacks on public homes that they can get away with it.
He chalks it up to the Gardaí’s limited capacity and resources, he said, rather than reluctance to find suspects and pressing charges.
A spokesperson for An Garda Síochána said its officers in Finglas are committed to protecting residents’ safety “through mobile patrol and community engagement”.
And it takes hate crime “very seriously”, carefully probing any reported incident, they said.
It’s encouraging victims to come forward if they feel an incident was tinged with hate, the spokesperson said. “We would like to reassure those of an ethnic or minority background that we are here to keep you safe,” they said.
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Work has been chipping away but much of the space will remain fenced off until early next year, to let new plants grow in.
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