YOUTHS on Dublin Corporation estates are waging campaigns of terror and intimidation against tenants, Dublin's assistant city manager warned yesterday.
Mr Owen Keegan said harassment, intimidation and drug related activities in corporation estates and flat complexes had increased in recent years. The main perpetrators were unemployed, aimless youths operating in gangs who "keep up a barrage of threats, abuse and assaults on victims and their property".
"In recent years drug abusers and dealers have added a new dimension of terror and distress to the lives of ordinary tenants," Mr Keegan told the National Housing Conference in Waterford yesterday.
Dublin Corporation knew of individuals and criminal families who had created a reign of terror on particular estates and complexes, Mr Keegan said. He stressed that most of the 31,000 tenants lived peaceful lives but many victims were "picked on if they are seen as being different".
This could include coming from a different area or having a different religious belief. "Elderly and single people are especially at risk. In some arias anyone who complains is also at risk of being targeted," Mr Keegan said.
Several factors contributed to the increasing problem of harassment and intimidation, including economic and social deprivation, and the decline of traditional household structures. He accepted the corporation had a responsibility to do everything it could to protect its tenants but said that on certain "difficult" estates, moving problem tenants elsewhere could be the only viable option.
Mr Keegan said there had been problems in the past in dealing with problem tenants through the courts because victims had to give evidence.
"The corporation's insistence that the complainant be prepared, to give evidence was unreasonable given the very real risks to witnesses and the State's inability to provide protection. This requirement has now been relaxed and we are increasingly relying on the evidence of gardai," Mr Keegan said.
"It generally takes a year to secure a conviction and these delays are very frustrating for the corporation, the tenants and the victims."
Mr Keegan said that many of, the laws at the authority's disposal were drawn up in the early 1960s and were proving ineffective now.