In the Liberties, council tenants ask to feel a bit of benefit from nearby Land Development Agency scheme

Phil Ashe, aged 65, has lived in Emmet Buildings in the Liberties all her life. Her parents got the council flat around 1936, she says. 

In younger years, she lived in the top-floor two-bed with her 12 brothers and sisters. But there was outside space – that’s why her father had chosen it, she says. 

“My whole family was raised here,” says Ashe. “It's home.”

The nearby area around Watling Street is, like much of the Liberties, expected to see major changes in the coming years.

Including with the Land Development Agency’s (LDA’s) plans for 550 new homes and facilities, dubbed Pear Tree Crossing. 

Part of that development will surround their homes on two sides, says Ashe, and – while detailed designs are yet to be drawn up – she is worried about natural light.

“We won’t have sunshine,” she says, “we are living here.”

Many residents are also already aware of the contrast that is likely to confront them when the new buildings go up.

“They are living in really poor conditions and looking at fancy new apartments going up around them,” says Fiadh Tubridy, a researcher at Maynooth University and a member of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU).

So, they ask, would there be a way to see some direct benefit for their complex too? Double-glazing for example, says Ashe

A spokesperson for the LDA said that it is undertaking community and stakeholder engagement soon "to understand wider views in advance of preparing and submitting the planning application for the wider site".

It hopes to submit its full planning application by the end of the year, they said, "to deliver affordable homes in this location at the earliest opportunity".

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council says that older council homes do have more maintenance issues than new ones. It is set to launch a new app to track conditions in housing this summer, they said.

Feeling left behind

The masterplan for Pear Tree Crossing walks through plans for hundreds of homes, business and cultural spaces, as well as new squares and routes for walking and cycling – on two big sites, either side of Thomas Street.

The homes that the LDA is building are set to be cost-rental but still, Ashe says, most locals won’t be able to afford to live in them.  

“This is the inner-city, this is the Liberties,” she says. 

Over the river, the rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Montpellier is €1,695 per month under a cost-rental scheme, according to the brochure. (These are new homes built on council land at what used to be O’Devaney Gardens.)

Says Tubridy: “The tenants see this development as part of the gentrification.”

On the northern site near Watling Street, there’s a square cut out in the plan where Emmet Buildings sit.

Tubridy says that the LDA had suggested that it could demolish Emmet Buildings as part of the development. 

But residents didn’t agree, says Ashe, because there was no guarantee that they’d be able to return after construction.

“We don’t want to be split up, I like my neighbours and I don’t want to leave my home,” she said.

Ashe is the youngest resident on her block too, she says. Her older neighbours don’t want to be cut off from their community, she says. 

Still, Ashe says she is worried about noise and pollution from the work, and about being overshadowed. 

Most residents don’t want to be surrounded by tall buildings, she says. 

“None of us are surveyors, we are not architects,” she says. But she knows that some residents on the ground and first floors already get little natural light. 

Really, the council needs to renovate the flats in Emmet Buildings, Ashe says. She paid herself to install double glazing which eradicated the dampness in her flat, she says. 

She is aware of only two flats in Emmet Buildings where the council has upgraded the windows to double glazing, she says. 

Yet, double glazing would help reduce dampness – and noise from the new development, she says. So could that be provided?

“We are going to be disturbed a lot,” says Ashe. “At the minimum, we need to get double glazing to minimise the noise disturbance.”

Tubridy says there are other parts of the city where council tenants in poor conditions are looking on in frustration as the ground is prepped for new cost-rental homes.

Residents of Cromcastle Court in Coolock have protested over similar concerns, she says. 

An LDA cost-rental project at Cromastle Underpass site is progressing quickly, she says, while existing social tenants are living in seriously substandard homes. 

“Residents there are really angry about it because they’ve been left so long without any progress on the regeneration of their estate, and there is this big development just across the road, which will be majority cost-rental,” says Tubridy.  

“It's another example of the amount of investment in cost-rental versus complete neglect for existing public housing,” she says. 

The LDA hasn’t yet responded to queries sent on Wednesday morning asking for an update on Pear Tree Crossing development, and whether it had any concerns that differences in standards between existing social homes and the new homes could impact community cohesion.

A Dublin City Council spokesperson said that older stock has more problems. 

More than 80 percent of Dublin City Council homes were built before building regulations were introduced in 1992, said the council spokesperson. 

But the council is “always striving to improve our current stock through our Planned Maintenance programme and our Energy Efficiency works”, they said.

The council last carried out condition surveys of its housing stock in 2018 and 2019, said the council spokesperson, and best practice is to do this every seven years.

The Local Government Management Agency, and the housing department, have devised an app for this with a private company called Addjust, they said. 

Council staff are getting used to the new app and plan to start another round of surveys in July, said the spokesperson.

[UPDATE: This article was updated on 6 June at 4.17pm to include responses from the Land Development Agency.]