The firebombing of social homes as a drugs-related intimidation tactic has become an “epidemic” in Dublin, the head of Dublin City Council’s antisocial behaviour unit has said.
The local authority has had to adopt a strategy of not allowing tenants to return to a community after they have been burned out of their homes, for their own safety and that of neighbours, councillors were told on Tuesday.
Mick Clarke, of the council’s antisocial behaviour and estate management division, told the council’s housing committee that six cases have been referred to him where families have been “burned out” of their homes.
“In relation to the threat to life and the fire issue,” he said, “it has become the new epidemic, the threat that these drug gangs have over people.”
READ MORE
In most cases the tenants want to return once their damaged homes have been renovated by the council. However, Clarke said he has had to take the decision not to rehouse them in the same area.
“If they are burned out of Cabra, they are not going back into Cabra,” he said. There are three reasons for this, he said. .
“If somebody is burned out and we do the house up and put them back in, there could be a fatality and we’d be asked: ‘why the hell did you put them back in?’
“The second reason is we have a duty of care to the neighbours and the community as a whole.”
On a number of occasions the house next door to the target has been set on fire, he said.
“The third one is it’s a huge amount of money [the council] have to come up with to bring that house back into a liveable condition.”
Clarke said he has had reports from gardaí suggesting that certain tenants “could very easily be a target” if they moved back into the house, but many are determined to return.
“I have interviewed a number of these families and all they want to do is go back into the area and they feel that I’m punishing them, but what I’ve said to them all is that, at the end of the day, this happened for a reason and we’re not prepared to take a chance.
“We will house them in accommodation, like for like, if they’re in a three-bed or a two-bedroom house, that’s what we will give them in an area outside of what we would class as the danger area.”
Where a tenant has not been burned out but there is a “threat to life”, he said the policy was also to move them to another area. The council’s local housing managers were often reluctant to take those tenants, “usually because of the drugs”, he said, but he has an obligation to “overrule” them.
“At the end of the day, if we have a report saying ‘these people are in danger move them out’ we have responsibility to move them and that’s what we do.”
