Donegal County Council will not have the capacity to build modular homes for private homeowners on the defective blocks redress scheme, it has been confirmed.
Chief Executive John McLaughlin told a special meeting of the council today that the local authority hasn’t the space, role or the function to house people seeking alternative accommodation while rebuilding their homes.
The council is however seeking to acquire temporary homes for their social housing tenants. Up to 1,000 social houses in Donegal are built with defective blocks and awaiting remediation under the enhanced scheme.
Mr McLaughlin told councillors today that the council fully expected the enhanced scheme to be up and running by May 2022, but it may be next May before it is in place.
He said the rush to provide €20,000 in emergency funding to nine of the worst-affected homes this week is an “indicator of a system that doesn’t work that well.”
Donegal County Council is awaiting a letter from the Department of Housing to release grants of €15,000 and €5,000 for families trapped in inhabitable homes this Christmas. Today’s special meeting heard that the council is anxious to help the affected homeowners and has already obtained their bank details in order to transfer the funds as soon as they are made available.
Up to 30 families may need urgent help in the very near future, said Cllr Martin McDermott, Chair of Donegal County Council’s Defective Blocks Redress Committee. This was acknowledged by the Chief Executive.
The council currently has more than 1,000 applicants on the original redress scheme, of which 478 are approved at stage one. The council has been able to approve 106 applications in the last month after pausing approvals for one year to wait for clarifications from the department. The new parameters have allowed some applications through that would have been denied last year, councillors were told.
The council plans to move forward on a backlog of almost 400 applications in the New Year.
Today’s meeting was described as ‘honest’ and ‘forthright’ on the council’s part as the executive laid out what was in its power in relation to the redress scheme.
CE Mr McLaughlin said the council is not the writer of the scheme, but the administrator. Mr. Patsy Lafferty, Director of Housing, said staff are working extremely hard on the backlog of cases and some have also moved to the Housing Agency has been set up to “hit the ground running” when the enhanced scheme is in place.
The current scheme and the enhanced scheme are both engineer and homeowner-led, councillors were told, leaving the council with limited power.
“I totally acknowledge the frustration and anxiety of homeowners dealing with this for years and years and not an ending in sight. We have huge empathy for them, even if people think we don’t,” Mr McLaughlin said.
He said the public has been misled to think that all decisions of the current scheme lands on the council’s doorstep, while the Department of Housing and the Housing Agency are also primary bodies.
He called on councillors to stand up for the role of the council and of council staff, citing intimidating incidents such as last week when a visitor reportedly turned up outside council buildings wearing a balaclava.
He said he could not allow such abusive treatment to continue.
“You can see what that would mean to staff inside. We have staff who do not want to work on this scheme anymore. Nobody would want that working environment for their son or daughter or any family members,” Mr McLaughlin said.
Cllr Michael McBride called on the council to be shovel ready with sites identified for modular homes as soon as funding is granted from the Department.
“There is an avalanche coming ahead of us. I’m certain this weather is going to bring out the worst in a lot of houses from now until the springtime,” he said.
“We need to be actively looking for sites (for modular housing), even without concrete commitment, we need to be ahead of the curve,” Cllr McBride said.
Cllr Gerry McMonagle called on the council needs to sit down and immediately put a proactive plan in place to find safe housing for people in need of accommodation.
Cllr McMonagle added it is important that the council does not rest on their laurels over Christmas after nine families get assistance.
“We need to be looking at this in the long term. We need a proactive plan for the amount of people needing accommodation going forward,” he said.
“We need to get the message to the Department of the humanitarian crisis to this. That is being lost on the department in the way they are responding to this.”
