Should council tenants take seats on their apartment complexes' owners' management companies, when council staff don't?

Segregation in communal areas in housing complexes is worsening, councillors say, with children living in the social housing apartments regularly being locked out of parties and play areas.

“Increasingly there is this, what I would consider disgusting apartheid being applied by the owners of these complexes,” said Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey at the full council meeting on Monday.

He called on the council to act, and for the national government to introduce national legislation to prevent owners from segregating access to communal areas.

He is not the first. Sinn Féin Housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin TD has and Social Democrats TD Cian O'Callaghan have previously said similar.

Lacey says tenants in two separate complexes have contacted him because their children are not allowed into some parts of the development to play with their friends. 

“It's embarrassing for the children,” he says. “This is something I’ll be raising and raising."

The issue isn't new. In 2023, Ciaran McCabe, a tenant in The Davitt in Drimnagh, spoke out about his young child not being able to access the outdoor playground.

But conversations in the Dublin City Council chamber about ways to upend these policies haven't changed anything yet.

Council housing manager Mick Mulhern has said the council cannot pay for social housing tenants to access services including gyms.

"We have to have value for money," he said. But if tenants are willing to pay for access themselves, “we would support the tenants in their right to access that”, he said.

An issue though is that social tenants are sometimes turned down even when they offer to pay.

Brian McKenna, who has a severely disabled daughter, was told he could not access a disabled car parking space in the complex where they lived, even if he paid.

Likewise, social tenants in Bluebell are willing to pay fees, but the owners won’t allow them to pay to access communal facilities, so their children are excluded from kids' parties, said Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan.

“It's dreadful,” says Doolan. “This is setting a dangerous precedent. This is legitimising housing apartheid.”

So now, some councillors are seeking another route to push their position: getting social tenants involved in running the private apartment complexes they live in.

The council owns homes in so many different apartment complexes across the city that it usually doesn’t attend the meetings of the owners' management companies (OMCs) that oversee how they're run, said an audit report, on the agenda at the monthly council meeting on Monday.

If the council's staff aren't going to the meetings, could it let social tenants who live in each complex elect a representative to go to the meeting of the OMC there?

“I believe if the council doesn’t wish to be represented then there should be a residents' representative appointed,” Lacey says. 

An empty seat at the table

Under a legal provision in the Planning and Development Act 2000, known as "Part V" – meant to get more social homes online, and also to reduce social segregation – Dublin City Council has bought apartments in private complexes across the city.

The council currently owns 2,570 homes in 385 complexes, each of which has an owners' management company, says the audit report.

For some big ones, including Mount Argus and Dublin Landings, the council sends a staff member to meetings, the report says. But it doesn’t send staff to all of them. There are so many.

“As Dublin City Council is a member of hundreds of OMCs, it is not feasible to have a representative present at every AGM,” says the report, but if there is an issue that the council is aware of, a manager attends.

The council is considering sending a proxy to attend the AGMs (annual general meetings), says the report. 

Doolan, the Sinn Féin councillor, says the council is spending vast sums on management fees while not having a voice on the OMCs overseeing how that money is spent, and how the complexes are run.

The continued reliance on social housing in private developments is also financially unsustainable, he says. “We are spending huge amounts of money on management fees, with spiralling costs."

Another reason that social tenants might want a seat on the OMC is to find out what is happening with maintenance and repairs in their buildings.

In December 2024, at the Hamptons in Ballymun, Valerie Hayes and Jordyn Murray said that they struggled to find out what was happening in their complex, which was beset by leaks. 

As social tenants, they had no right to eyes and ears on the OMC, the company controlled by flat owners, which in turn hires a property manager to keep up the common areas of the building. 

Hayes said that a residents' representative should get to attend to feed back information to the other social tenants.  “Even to nominate one person to go and take notes or whatever,” she said. 

Lacey says the council should allow residents to nominate a representative to have their voices heard at the OMC and to feedback information to the other social tenants. 

Doolan said he agrees with the idea in principle. But if so, the council needs to support the residents and it might create a lot of extra work for the representative, he says. 

What is the solution?

“The real problem is the local authorities' dependence on Part V” to increase its stock of social housing, says Doolan. “What's happening is not sustainable. It's wrong.”

At the council meeting Monday, Sinn Féin Councillor Ciarán Ó Meachair said the issue has come up in his area, in Dublin 8 too. “Something has to be done about the ongoing segregation in Part V developments." 

Tenants are not allowed access to meeting rooms, which is impacting community cohesion, Ó Meachair said. 

To tackle the segregation issue, Doolan says councillors should insert a clause in the next city development plan to restrict development of segregated facilities in the future.

Lacey says he thinks barring some residents' access to communal spaces might already breach planning rules. He plans to bring it up in the planning committee, he says.  

“I think all councillors will know that we are not going to pay for tenants to access services, gyms etcetera on site,” said Mulhern, the manager.

“Wherever it has arisen that tenants aren’t allowed to access, where they have offered to pay for services themselves, we would support the tenants in their right to access that,” he said. 

In those instances, the council would discuss that with developers and management agents to negotiate access, he said.