Emergency modular housing, due to be completed in Ballymun last December to house families living in hotels, will not be available until May, it has emerged.
In a statement issued early in March, Dublin City Council said the 22 houses on Balbutcher Lane in the Poppintree area of Ballymun would be finished by the end of this month.
The houses, the first of 500 modular homes to be used as emergency housing for homeless families across Dublin, have been under construction since last November.
They were to be delivered by Christmas using an “ultra-accelerated procurement” process.
However, days before they were due for completion, the council said they would not be ready until January.
It blamed the delay on protests at the site in November and bad weather in December.
The next phase of modular, or what the council calls “rapid-build” housing had been due for completion next June.
But at the start of March the council cancelled the tender process for 131 homes on four other sites around Dublin.
Meeting deadline
In its cancellation notice, the council said it had received an “insufficient number of applicants who confirmed they would be able to meet the deadline in order to conduct a competition” for the housing at
Finglas
,
Darndale
,
Cherry Orchard
and
Drimnagh
.
In the statement issued on March 2nd, the council said it was inviting a new competition for the 131 homes.
The cancelled tender had advertised the provision of housing on the four sites as a single development to be completed by June 30th.
But the new tender split the sites into four lots, with different completion dates for each site.
The timelines were “working towards the completion of all units by autumn 2016”, the statement said.
However, in the new tender documents issued by the council on the same day, a deadline of December 12th was given for the completion of all 131 houses.
The same statement had said the original Ballymun houses would be completed by the end of March, but the timeline for their occupation has now been pushed back to the second week in May.
Completely unrealistic
Local councillors have called on officials to provide clarity.
"Clearly, completely unrealistic time frames were given, but I find it very odd that's it's taking so long and I find it very difficult to get a straight answer on why it is taking so long," said local Sinn Féin councillor Noeleen Reilly.
Fianna Fáil councillor Paul McAuliffe said there is no reason for modular housing to take so long to complete.
“The fact is this is not modular housing,” he said. “It is standard timber-frame housing, but we were told it was modular housing that would be put up quickly to deal with an emergency situation and so the normal planning process could be circumvented.”
