Half modular homes planned by Dublin City Council funded

Just half of the modular houses due to be completed by Dublin City Council for homeless families by the end of this year have secured funding from Minister for Housing Simon Coveney.

The council last March issued tenders for 131 "rapid build" prefabricated houses on vacant council lands in Finglas, Darndale, Cherry Orchard and Drimnagh. A deadline of mid-December was set for their completion.

Mr Coveney yesterday allocated €12 million for the construction of 67 houses at two of the sites only – Mourne Road, Drimnagh, which will have 29 houses, and Belcamp in Darndale with 38.

“These new homes will be fast-tracked over the coming months and I expect to see families moving in to them before year-end,” he said.

However, no funding has been allocated for the remaining 64 houses, 24 of which were to have been at Cherry Orchard near Ballyfermot and the remaining 40 at St Helena's Drive in Finglas.

While the Finglas site was due for completion in December, the tender for the Cherry Orchard homes had a date of October 17th for the houses to be available for occupation.

A spokesman for the council last night said “outstanding queries are waiting to be resolved” with the preferred bidders for the Finglas and Cherry Orchard sites.

A “quick turnaround” was expected in relation to these queries, he said, after which a funding application would be submitted to the Department of Housing.

Suggestions that the bidders for the two sites had pulled out of the process were not true, the council said.

It declined to name the companies involved and said it was not in yet in a position to say who the successful bidders for the Drimnagh and Darndale site were because letters of intent would not be issued to them until next week.

It is not known if Western Building Systems, the company which built the first modular housing for homeless families in Ballymun, is involved in any of the four projects.

The council is in dispute with the company over the final cost of the 22 homes, which it has been mooted is in the region of €240,000 per house.

The Ballymun homes had been due for completion last December, but families did not move into the 22 homes until May this year. The council and the company have entered into an arbitration process in relation to the final cost.

The 67 houses approved by Mr Coveney are expected to cost about €180,000 each. The recently published Government Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness sets a target of 1,500 rapid-build homes to re-house homeless families from hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation, to be provided by 2018. Of these 200 are set to be provided by the end of 2016, 800 in 2017 and the remainder in 2018.

‘Insufficient applicants’

The delivery of the 131 homes at the four sites has been beset by delays. The council issued tenders for the housing last December with a completion date for June this year for all of the homes.

However, last March it cancelled this tender saying it had received an “insufficient number of applicants who confirmed they would be able to meet the deadline in order to conduct a competition”.

It reissued tenders splitting the project into four lots with different completion dates for each site ranging from October to December this year.