Last week's fire in a Dublin city centre apartment block should serve as a wake-up call, according to some. Paul Cullen reports
Six beds are lined up in a row in the small basement room. The air is musty, the walls peeling. The bathroom is up the stairs, shared with other flats, and the only natural light comes from a small strip of glazing along the top of one wall.
This is Dublin in the 21st century, as described by a housing outreach worker, not the city notorious for its slum tenements in the 19th and early 20th century.
Hard as it may be to believe, housing conditions for some tenants are almost as bad as they were 150 years ago. We may have said goodbye to the infectious diseases and chronic poverty, but overcrowding, substandard accommodation and a lack of legal safeguards remain a reality for many of those in the private rented sector.
While new protections have been introduced for tenants in recent years, their worth is greatly diluted by a lack of monitoring and regulation.
Moreover, the Dublin of the "Celtic Tiger" differs from the former second city of the British empire in one key aspect; many of those at the bottom of the accommodation ladder these days are immigrants rather than impoverished Irish families. And, like immigrants everywhere, many are ignorant of their rights and, for various reasons, reluctant to engage with the authorities.
Thus, the private rented sector, dubbed by the housing agency Threshold as "the forgotten sector" is, today, more forgotten than ever.
Immigrant tenants, as much as their landlords, have no desire to attract official attention. If officials were to enforce the planning laws by, for example, putting an end to overcrowding, tenants would find themselves paying more for rent or even being evicted.
Up to 20 per cent of Threshold's clients are from outside Ireland. "In most cases, they don't want us to do anything," says Bob Jordan of Threshold. "They just want to know their rights. Many of them fear being evicted, or losing their jobs. As a result, we don't know what the landlords are up to."
The problems faced by marginalised tenants unsure of their rights are set out in the agency's annual report. Take the example of Benjamin, a 25 year-old non-national renting a house with his wife and two small children in Cork, who paid €200 for heating oil on the advice of his landlord. When the heating system failed, the landlord refused to accept responsibility, at least until the agency weighed in on the tenant's behalf.
Another immigrant tenant, Karol, came home one day to find his family's possessions on the street. The landlord had summarily evicted them, but relented when threatened with legal proceedings.
Last week at least 17 African immigrants, including 14 children, died in an apartment fire in Paris; this follows another fire in the French capital in April, which killed 24 immigrants.
We haven't had a fire here on this scale since the Stardust tragedy in 1981. Fire deaths have dropped appreciably in recent years, from 63 in 2001 to 39 last year. So far this year, there have been 26 fire deaths. This should not give rise to complacency. As Threshold's chairwoman, Aileen Hayden, pointed out last week, older buildings are not deemed to be in breach of fire safety regulations until they had been inspected and an improvement notice issued. She claimed such buildings were very often "fire traps, even if they are not technically in breach of the fire regulations".
Last week's fire in a period building on Dublin's Ormond Quay shed some light on the housing conditions experienced by some immigrants. At least 15 people, mostly Asians, were rescued from upper-floor windows when the fire broke out in the hallway, blocking the only means of escape to the street. Five residents were rescued from a small yard at the back.
The windows of the ground-floor rooms, which contained bunk beds, cooking and washing facilities, were barred. Mercifully, the fire occurred during the day rather than at night.
The building contained at least nine units, according to the estimates of residents, yet the Private Residential Tenancies Board told The Irish Times last week the property does not appear on its register.
Since last year, landlords are obliged to register each individual tenancy with the PRTB within a month of its commencement. Penalties under the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 include a fine of up to €3,000 and/or six months in prison.
After a slow start, over 45,000 landlords have registered a total of 74,000 tenancies. However, as yet, no prosecutions have been taken against landlords for failing to register.
The Ormond Quay building did have a fire safety certificate, issued when the building was converted into flats in 1997, according to the Dublin Fire Service, and the smoke alarm in the hallway did its job. The planning application for conversion from offices to flats clearly stated that the window railings, a period detail, would be retained and that fire regulations would be complied with.
Assistant chief fire officer Pat Fleming says there is much confusion about fire certificates: "These are drawings submitted to satisfy the planning requirements, and they don't involve inspections." Neither are they required in the case of most older (pre-1992) buildings. He points out that the fire service carried out 2,500 inspections last year; however, most of these were of public places such as bars and nightclubs, or on foot of specific complaints. The vast majority of rented accommodation doesn't come to the notice of the fire authorities.
Mr Fleming says he "can't accept" Threshold's claim that many older buildings are "fire traps", but goes on to acknowledge that it is "not feasible" for the fire services to inspect every building. Under fire safety legislation, he points out, both owners and occupiers have an obligation to guard against fire.
This applies as much to the management of the building, such as the storage of rubbish and the replenishment of fire extinguishers, as its design. It's a similar story in relation to general inspections; most buildings are not inspected and nothing much happens when infringements are discovered. As Threshold pointed out last week, 30 per cent of buildings inspected last year were found to be sub-standard, yet only four prosecutions were taken.
Ms Hayden warns of the threat of a new "slummification" in Dublin. "It would be a tragic and scandalous irony if, having historically moved so many of our people out of slums into social housing, we find that after a period of unprecedented prosperity the whole process has in large part been reversed, and governments of the future have to initiate once again the kind of slum clearance programmes of the late 1940s and 1950s.
The PRTB, which has yet to prosecute a single landlord for failing to register, is to decide soon what action it will take to "encourage" greater compliance. It plans to publish the register of tenancies shortly; although this will not give personal information on landlords, tenants or rent levels.