July update from Monitoring Committee

Following on from the recent public meeting up-date, the Monitoring Committee has been in contact with The Office of the Minister for Housing and with Mr. Brendan Kenny, Deputy CEO, DCC whom we met and discussed the whole area of allocations for the new houses.

(“Knocknarea Court”, Knocknarea Road, Drimnagh, Dublin 12)

As a result of our intensive discussions and negotiations,

• We can state categorically and without fear of contradiction, all the new houses will not be allocated to Homeless people as was widely and wildly rumoured in recent weeks.
• We can further clarify the following is the situation regarding allocations:
  1. Up to 16 houses will be allocated to people from existing DCC Housing Lists with the homes they are leaving going to Homeless families.
  2. Over half of the remainder will be allocated to homeless people who have a connection with the Drimnagh / Dublin 12 area
  3. The remaining 6 or 7 will be allocated off the Homeless list.

As a further result of our efforts a thorough vetting process of all potential tenants has been undertaken involving both DCC and An Gárda Siochána.

The timeline for occupancy now is moving into the middle September so I suppose we can say, with some confidence, that the new houses will be fully occupied by the end of September.

The day-to-day Management of this new complex will be in the hands of a professional housing agency (Sofia) that has a very good track record doing this kind of work. This is welcomed by the Monitoring Committee on behalf of all of Drimnagh’s Residents and we feel it will allay any fears or worries people might have had.

We again thank Drimnagh Resident’ Association, Drimnagh Community Residents Group, McAuley Centre Management and Local Residents from Curlew Road for kindness, courtesy and patience over the past 10 months.

Also a sincere thanks to Brian, Declan and Chris from DCC for their time and efforts and genuine attempts to dialogue on the various issues as they arose.