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Dáil Éireann debate -
Tuesday, 11 Mar 1986

Vol. 364 No. 7

Adjournment Debate. - Ballinasloe (Galway) Housing Estate.

I sincerely thank the Chair for allowing me to raise this matter on the Adjournment. I will be giving some of my time to my colleague, Deputy Noel Treacy. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, and congratulate him on his appointment. I hope he will be able to help us solve this problem.

I am speaking this evening of one of the oldest and most historic housing estates in Ballinasloe, County Galway. We would like the Department to provide finance for the necessary improvements to this housing estate, in particular the provision of proper heating and sanitary facilities. The Minister will agree it is a scandal that in 1986 these houses do not have bathrooms but have outside toilets only. I hope the Minister can rectify this situation by providing the finance which the Ballinasloe Urban Council have requested on numerous occasions.

In 1985 when Building on Reality was published, hope was raised that there would be a scheme of improvements available for local authorities. Paragraph 5.91, reads:

Serious deterioration is affecting certain rented houses, mostly built under low-cost arrangements in the relatively recent past, as well as some older rented local authority housing. Major works of a structural nature are needed if these houses are to continue to be suitable for renting. Local authorities will be allowed to assign limited funds from their annual allocation for local authority housing for improvements to these houses, where this would represent good value for money. These funds will attract loan charges subsidy.

That last sentence is the most important in that statement and I hope the Minister can provide the finance and the loan charges subsidies.

We want to see the schemes the Ballinasloe Urban Council have applied for implemented. The council want to provide bathrooms in particular, windows, ranges, rewiring and other works and they applied for help more than one year ago. At that time a housing inspector visited the estate and estimated that £10,000 to £11,000 could be spent on each house. Last September the Department wanted extra information and the council commissioned the National Building Agency to provide it. All details have been sent to the Department and I do not believe any further information is necessary. If that is the position, I hope the Minister will confirm it tonight, because I fail to see why that scheme cannot go ahead.

We are talking about pre-1940 houses, and I mention that particularly in the context of the house improvement grant scheme. These houses are 50 years behind the times as regards heating and sanitation in particular. The Minister may have seen an article in The Sunday World, 9 March 1986, and I will quote what that article said:

Doors are falling off hinges, windows are broken, ranges are not even fit to boil a kettle and rats have chewed up the floorboards in some houses in St. Grellan's Estate.

That is a horrific example of the inhuman conditions in which people in this estate are living and shows how urgent it is that this problem should be tackled.

St. Grellan's is a close knit community. They have a very active residents' association. They keep their public representatives informed of the problems in the area and they have raised these matters on many occasions with the urban council and the Department. Since the last local elections they have their own councillor, a member of the Minister's party who I am sure has been in contact with the Minister on these matters. The Labour councillor, Stephen Connell, with the other eight councillors, the town clerk and the manager have been trying to get the necessary finance for these improvements.

Originally there were 60 houses in this housing estate, some of these are now doubled up. I understand we are talking about 56 houses now and there may be need for other houses to be doubled up as well, in other words, four bedroomed houses instead of two bedroomed houses. Whatever happens, sanitary facilities as well as heating and cooking facilities must be improved. One of the housewives quoted in last Sunday's newspaper article talked about life being hell in that estate. She said:

I believe in miracles every time the kettle boils on our range. Our daughter and son are under doctor's care. It is the cold that has made them ill. This housing scheme has been deplored by the medical profession in Ballinasloe. In a recent article in The Ballinasloe Herald, a senior doctor, Dr. Tarpey, spoke of the inhuman living conditions in this estate.

I spoke recently in this House on the Homeless Persons Bill. I was speaking about the provision of ranges and sanitary services in houses throughout the country, but I mentioned in particular St. Grellan's housing estate. I would like this Government and all Governments to devise a crash programme for local authorities to provide these basic facilities. There is no use in Governments boasting about the number of new houses they have built. That is good for statistics but it does not help housing estates like St. Grellan's where these facilities are so badly needed. I would like the Minister to give an assurance tonight that the money will be provided very soon for this type of programme in St. Grellan's estate in particular and in other housing estates throughout County Galway and the rest of the country.

Tonight is a very important night in Ballinasloe because the urban council are discussing their estimates. The frustration of the residents of this housing estate can be seen from the fact that they are marching to the urban council offices. This march is representative of the town of Ballinasloe, as the old Irish saying goes, idir cléir agus tuath a bhí ann. These people are very frustrated because of a lack of action, and I have given some of the history of what has happened. Something must be done and quickly. In my view it is appropriate that the residents should march to the council offices tonight when the estimates are being discussed. I know the council have been trying to get the necessary finance for these improvements.

As a county councillor and a public representative for the Ballinasloe area I appeal to the Minister to provide the necessary finance to improve the living conditions of the people in this estate. The article to which I referred in The Sunday World of last Sunday referred to the possibility of a rent strike if those improvements are not carried out quickly. I am sure the Minister does not want to have a rent strike. Neither does anybody in the Ballinasloe area. But there has been continuous delay on the part of the Department in implementing what the people there want even though departmental inspectors have visited the estate and the local urban council have commissioned the National Building Agency to send all the information requested by the Department. All information has now been furnished to the Minister's Department with regard to the work so urgently needed to be done in St. Grellan's housing estate. I know that the chairman of Ballinasloe Urban Council, councillor Patsy Geraghty, has called on the Department to make the money available and not refuse consistently to help out these people.

Let the Minister of State honour what was promised in the Government document Building on Reality 1985-87, in chapter 5, paragraph 5.91 to the effect that local authorities would be allowed to undertake this work and that the loan charge subsidy would apply to them. Let the Minister show the House here this evening that the Government are serious in what they said in that document.

I am delighted to support my colleague's call for immediate action to alleviate the problems that the people in St. Grellan's estate in Ballinasloe have had to put up with for over 50 years. This estate was built in 1934, in one of the first housing programmes undertaken by the first de Valera Fianna Fáil Government. Apart from some works done in 1974, 40 years later, to nine of those houses, no other work has been undertaken there since. Today four of the houses only have proper bathrooms and five only have toilets.

This evening, as the two local representatives, Deputy Kitt and I are calling on the Government, through the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Deputy Toddy O'Sullivan, to have these works carried out as a matter of urgency. I take this opportunity to congratulate the Minister of State on his appointment and to wish him every success. I hope one of his first successes will be an immediate, positive decision to ensure that the money is made available for these remedial works. We are calling on him and the Government to take immediate action on the unnatural and inhuman conditions to which the people in St. Grellan's estate have been subjected for far too long.

I should like to give some comments contained in the local Ballinasloe Herald of last week. That paper's editor, a well known national journalist, Mr. Jim Carney, visited the estate himself last week. On the front page of that issue there is a report on the situation obtaining in Ballinasloe.

Would the Deputy please give the date of the issue?

Saturday, 1 March 1986. As Deputy Kitt has said, some of the comments are to the effect that it would be a miracle if a kettle boiled in the estate. Major difficulties are encountered with ranges. There is a need to have a new range installed in every house. Even when repairs are carried out by local officials very often they have no effect. It is virtually impossible to light a fire. One family are quoted as saying they could not cook their Christmas dinner, that the hot press and water tank are virtually useless, that their kitchen is extremely damp. This newspaper carries a number of photographs showing the dampness on the walls, the wallpaper falling away from the walls and highlights the terrible, inhumane conditions that children and pregnant mothers are condemned to. These are totally inhumane conditions in this age. Total frustration is felt by the people in Ballinasloe at the long delay experienced in getting these remedial works carried out. There is another comment to the effect that one woman has had her floor boards eaten away by rats, that her family never had proper accommodation. There is over-crowding in many of the houses.

I know the people in St. Grellan's estate well. I come from near Ballinasloe. I went to school in the town for five years. I worked in the town for 12 years and I have been a local TD for Ballinasloe for the past three and a half years. I have had the pleasure of being in St. Grellan's estate many times over the past 22 years. I can say that these are a proud group of people, with their own idiosyncrasies, their own priorities, traditions and ethos. They are a community-minded group of people. They built their own community centre in 1976, where there is nightly supervision of their children doing their homework. There is no room in the houses to do homework or have a proper, natural living environment. That is the reason the local community centre is used for that purpose.

The people, in their frustration, elected a local councillor to the urban council at the local elections last June. He happens to be a member of the Labour Party. He is secretary of the residents' association and is a fine representative of the people. He has said continuously that he is totally frustrated with the attitude of the Minister for Energy and the former Minister for the Environment to the plight of these people. I appeal to the Minister of State this evening to ensure that some immediate action is undertaken. In the document Building on Reality 1985-87 the Government gave a commitment that moneys would be made available for the renovation and reconstruction of pre-1940 local authority houses. Ballinasloe has one of the oldest and most historic estates in St. Grellan's. They made an application to the Department of the Environment submitted through the NBA for these moneys. The necessary documentation was forwarded to the Department in April 1985.

Additional information was sought by the Department in September 1985. This was a complete surprise to the urban district council as they believed they had submitted all of the necessary documentation with their initial application in April 1985. Yet they had to submit further documentation on 21 January 1986. To date they have received no response even though they acceded to the Department's request on no fewer than three occasions, April 1985, September 1985 and January 1986. As far as the people in Ballinasloe are concerned it amounts to total procrastination and a frustration of their efforts made through the urban district council, a council who have not the necessary resources to undertake these remedial works themselves. As far as the people of St. Grellan's estate and Ballinasloe Urban District Council are concerned walls need to be plastered, bathrooms need to be added to the houses and extra rooms provided.

There were two headlines at the top of The Ballinasloe Herald last week. One read “Angry residents to defy Council; We won't pay, Say Grellan's”. On the other side there appeared the heading “Dunlo Row flares at Enquiry”. There is at present a public inquiry going on in Ballinasloe, ordered by the Minister for the Environment, Deputy John Boland, regarding a compulsory purchase order for lands on which the urban district council hope to build houses. In 1986 £1 million was available for the building of those houses. I contend that an immediate order should be made to have this money spent in building 12 new houses in Fallon's field, adjacent to St. Grellan's Housing Estate to alleviate the over-crowding and pressure on the people in St. Grellan's at present, providing them with proper living conditions.

I want to quote from The Ballinasloe Herald of 1 March, 1986 in the words of the council chairman, Mr. Patsy Geraghty, who said:

We are all annoyed and aggrieved at the failure of the Department of the Environment to make funds available to Ballinasloe Urban District Council to carry out work such as that necessary at St. Grellan's. We have met with the stone wall in our plans to provide a welfare home in the town and a sports field in St. Brendan's but I agree that the St. Grellan's situation is very bad. The answer is money and only the Department of the Environment can come up with the necessary funds. This estate has toilet facilities that are 50 years out of date and a complete overhaul is the only solution.

With my colleague, I appeal to the Minister of State to treat this case with the utmost compassion and make an immediate expedient decision to make the funds available. He should act on the application that has been with him since April 1985. A positive decision should be made in the interest of the parents, the adults and the children who are all living in totally unnatural and overcrowded conditions. Those conditions have been criticised by the local representatives and were clearly illustrated by the media in recent weeks. I hope that tonight we get a positive response to our request.

I should like to thank Deputies Kitt and Treacy for their kind words of welcome to me in my capacity as Minister of State at the Department of the Environment. Initially, I must make it clear that the basic responsibility for the management, maintenance and improvement of their rented dwelling rests on the local authority who provided the dwellings. I was a little surprised to hear that after 50 years it was not until April or May of last year that an application was submitted to the Department to update these houses. Bearing that in mind I was surprised to hear Deputy Treacy say that they had met a stone wall attitude in their representations.

I was quoting the chairman of the urban district council.

It appears that somebody was not doing his duty if that scheme of houses was allowed to get into such a disrepair. It is most unfair to come at this late stage and level accusations at the Department of the Environment. To meet the outgoings and the cost of rennovation local authorities have available to them their receipts from rents, as well as 40 per cent of the proceeds of sales of local authority dwellings together with other miscellaneous receipts related to housing. Local authorities may also avail of the Department's improvement grant scheme for works such as the provision of bathroom-bedroom extensions and the provision of water and sewerage facilities. The after grant cost of such work can be funded by means of an unsubsidised loan scheme which is also operated by my Departmentr. That loan scheme has been in operation for many years but many local authorities have not available of it. Local authorities can, from their own resources, pay any loan charges. A sum of £1 million has been available down the years but few authorities have availed of the scheme.

In drawing up the national plan, Building on Reality, the Government recognised that the existing aids might not be sufficient in cases where local authorities found themselves faced with outgoings not coming within the category of what might be termed normal maintenance and improvement costs. This kind of situation arose mainly in connection with the remedying of serious defects which have arisen both in so-called low cost housing and in some older housing stock. I imagine that St. Grellan's fits into the latter category.

In an effort to help these authorities to meet the higher cost involved in remedying the defects associated with such housing, paragraph 5.91 of the national plan provided that authorities might assign limited funds from their annual allocation for local authority housing to carry out a major programme of improvement works to low cost housing and certain older stock suffering from serious deterioration.

Local authorities were notified by circular letter dated 10 January 1985 of the terms of the new remedial works scheme. Under the scheme, capital, limited to £12,000 per dwelling, subsidisable at a rate not exceeding 80 per cent, may be made available to local authorities to fund major repairs of a structural nature to pre-1940 houses suffering from serious deterioration. Houses purchased from the local authority may be included in a proposal for assistance under the scheme where they form part of a scheme of rented houses and their inclusion is necessary to give an acceptable result to the scheme as a whole. Essential works of an improvement nature such as the provision of a water supply, sewerage facilities or a bathroom could be included in a proposal provided other necessary works of reconstruction arising from structural deficiency are sufficient in themselves to bring the houses within the scope of the scheme. Tenant purchasers are expected to contribute half the cost of the works either by means of a lump sum payment, an extended or revised annuity or a combination of both. The scheme is designed to encourage tenant participation as much as possible. To this end, in order to qualify for assistance under the scheme, local authorities must, where appropriate, provide for environmental works to be carried out in cooperation with local residents.

Applications under the remedial work scheme are running at a very high level and to date some 35 valid applications valued at over £30 million have been received. The capital allocated for the scheme for 1986 has had to be limited to £5 million having regard to the competing demands of other housing expenditure. As the applications on hands far exceed this amount, it has been necessary to deal with the applications on a priority basis related to the urgency and extent of the work involved.

I should like to assure the Deputies that St. Grellan's will receive every consideration and if it is found necessary, will receive preferential treatment.

Obviously those estates which are suffering from major structural defects such as leaking roofs, water penetration, defective walling and so on, will have to be dealt with more urgently than those whose main defects are of a less serious character. A degree of priority must be given to the need to remedy the serious defects which have often plagued the so called low-cost housing since its construction in the late sixties and early seventies. The remedial works scheme represents the first serious effort to tackle this serious problem. While it was only to be expected that authorities would be quick to take advantage of the generous nature of the scheme's provisions, the fact is that all applications cannot be allowed immediately but must take their places in whatever order of priority is decided.

An application for assistance under the remedial works scheme was received from Ballinasloe Urban District Council in May 1985. There is a conflict in regard to that date because the application was received in April. The work proposed consists of the replacement of defective doors, windows and plumbing, the provision of insulation and the installation of bathroom facilities. Following a visit by the Department's inspector in September 1985 — I do not think we can be accused of stonewalling in that respect — the council were requested to submit additional information of a technical nature to enable the proposal to be further examined. This information was submitted to my Department at the end of January 1986 and the file has again been referred to my Department's inspector.

It is fair to say that as far as the Department are concerned the matter is not closed and we have not abandoned the idea of giving assistance. However, the House will appreciate that other local authorities consider that they have problems and with £5 million available it is difficult to meet all the demands made on us. I am sorry that I cannot at this stage give an indication of the outcome of the council's application for assistance under the scheme. A decision will, however, be made in the matter as soon as possible after the inspector's report has been received and considered in the Department. I should like to assure the Deputies, and they in turn can inform my Labour colleague in Ballinasloe, that as far as the Department are concerned the matter is still under active consideration. However, we are awaiting a report.

It is most unjust to suggest that the Department are stonewalling or are not treating this in a humane manner. The faults in the houses did not arise overnight. Doors do not rot or houses become rat infested in a space of ten months, as the Deputies suggested. I am surprised that action was not taken by the local authority before now. The Deputies who raised the matter are members of Galway County Council and as such have an input into the affairs of Ballinasloe. It appears to me that there was negligence at that level also. If a charge is to be levelled at anybody the Deputies cannot walk away from it. The House has my assurance that on receipt of the inspector's report the matter will receive careful consideration. I hope we will be able to respond in a positive manner.

Will the Minister of State be recommending this scheme for sanction? Can he give the House any indication of when a decision will be made?

The Minister has answered those questions.

Has the £5 million been spent?

It would be most unwise of me to answer without a technical report. It will be on foot of the inspector's report that a decision will be taken. The timescale depends on how soon the inspector submits his report. I should like to tell Deputy Kitt that the £5 million has not been allocated in full and there is still some money available.

How many schemes can be funded by the £5 million?

The Dáil adjourned at 11 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 12 March 1986.

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