Call to hire Council flat residents who 'take pride' in their estates for upkeep
Dublin City Council is being urged to allow flat residents to assist with urgent housing maintenance needs, and to be financially rewarded for doing so.
At Monday’s South East Area Committee meeting, Sinn Féin Councillor Kourtney Kenny put forward a proposal to tackle chronic deficits in council maintenance staffing . The local authority is currently battling major recruitment and retention issues alongside an ageing workforce, with Senior Executive Officer Ursula Donnellan confirming that maintenance vacancies frequently fluctuate between 10 and 20 open positions.
With this in mind, Cllr Kenny suggests making use of the unemployed people living in council complexes across the city who wish to re-join the workforce and to hire them to look after their neighbourhood through the Community Employment (CE) scheme. She said it’s clear the council are struggling to keep up with the regular maintenance of all their properties, and to have those who actually live within the community take up these roles would be a win-win for everyone.
Labour Cllr Fiona Connolly agreed there is a need to make up for the shortfall in maintenance staff, and questioned if there’s currently ten vacancies available, whether that funding has been set aside and can still be used to tackle the issue. She stressed that “thousands of hours of work” are unaccounted for and wondered if it would be possible to hire temporary staff to help address their maintenance backlog.
Cllr Connolly questioned if the council are making their job spec attractive enough, and argued that they must find a way to retain experienced staff. She stressed the value of long-standing expertise and said currently being ten staff down is a “huge disadvantage” for the council.
Utilising people within their communities was supported by Labour Cllr Dermot Lacey, who stressed the loss of live-in caretakers in council complexes over recent decades has been strongly felt. He said they acted as “the eyes and ears of the council” within communities and provided a firmer link between local authorities and social housing tenants .
“We should look at ways of availing people who live in complexes to contribute more, and be rewarded more. We’re not asking people to do things for nothing,” he said. But Cllr Lacey did state a similar idea was tested using the predecessor to the CE scheme many years ago and it was “riddled with industrial relations issues”.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, attempts to use state-funded social employment schemes for caretaker roles faced backlash from trade unions. With the potential for pushback, there is a danger that temporary work schemes could be seen as an improper substitute for full-time vacancies.
"In 1986 when the scheme was set up, the commitment given by the Government and continued by the present Government was that the scheme for full-time jobs as caretakers or clerk typists would not be replaced by the social employment scheme. Unfortunately that has not been the case. The position is that up to 200 jobs have been lost as caretakers or clerk typists and the Government have attempted to replace those by social employment schemes," a Seanad Éireann debate from June 6, 1990 outlined.
Speaking about her suggestion with Dublin Live, Cllr Kenny said she knows first-hand from living in a council complex the pride with which the local community takes in their space. She said there are so many people who work tirelessly to keep the place clean and do the work of the council for them, without being asked.
As a way to encourage people back into the workforce, foster community connection, and make a dent in the council’s maintenance needs, Cllr Kenny believes CE schemes could be the answer that benefits everyone. While complexes often have a caretaker, they can be overwhelmed by the broad duties of addressing everything from overgrown greenery, pest hazards, dumping, and stairwell cleaning.
“In my complex alone, there's 250 flats. So that's one man to look after all that. How in one day is anyone meant to be cleaning the stairwells and washing the stairs?" Cllr Kenny asked.
She stressed the impact of the ‘broken-window theory,’ where one aspect of the complex falls behind and it encourages further degradation. By having people who literally live within and have a stake in the community in charge of maintenance issues, they can address these needs before they become a problem and avoid waiting weeks, or often months, for the council to step in with outside help.
“If you put the power back to the community and allow them to have the facilities like providing power washers for one end of the flats and the other end, that could then lead to a schedule enacted by the residents and free up a huge amount of time for the council,” she said.
It can often take months for government approval to hire staff within the council, but Cllr Kenny points out that CE schemes bypass this because they are funded by the Department of Social Protection. She recalls, after being elected in 2023, witnessing an impressive presentation in the Mansion House about a whole new fleet of maintenance staff, but said all these years later it still hasn’t come to fruition and is calling for more outside-of-the-box thinking.
“I'm sick of giving out about things not being done and I actually want to make sure that we're putting forward suggestions of things that can be done. I want to ultimately start dealing with things that are within our control and that we can advocate for on a bigger scale in a positive way,” she said.
“There's people that I know from my flat and other flats who are in long-term unemployment and whether it's down to some of them having disabilities or they're neuro-diverse or they never really had any luck in the workforce. One of the things that they're really good at is keeping the place clean.
“It’s that whole thing that goes back to pride of place. I think giving people that sense of dignity back and that sense of purpose is really important. Because it has a knock-on effect, you never know there could be people that end up coming from that and going on to do an apprenticeship.”
Cllr Kenny said this is an idea she is determined to pursue and conversations with council executives so far have been promising. “I did strike up a conversation about getting the CE schemes going and they were like, 'it's something we'll look into,' but I'm not going to really let that lie,” she said.
“I'm going to ask for a meeting with the head of maintenance to see how we can actually get this enacted because I think it's really important.”
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