A single Dublin apartment complex accounted for nearly half of all rental bans issued by the council in one year, an Irish Times investigation shows.
Buckingham Village, a 125-flat complex in the northeast inner city, has appeared on Dublin City Council’s (DCC) prohibition list dozens of times since 2018, far more than any other housing complex.
Prohibition notices are issued only after a landlord has ignored repeated warnings to improve a rental property.
If a complaint is received about a property, a council official will inspect it and, if needed, issue an improvement letter. If this notice is ignored, an improvement notice will be issued.
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If this is ignored, a prohibition notice will be issued, forbidding the landlord from offering it for rent until substantial improvements are completed.
“It is an escalation of enforcement and cannot be used as a first step of enforcement,” a DCC spokesman said.
DCC first started issuing prohibition notices to flats in Buckingham Village in 2018. By 2022, 27 flats in the complex were subject to rental prohibitions – more than one-fifth of units in the complex.
That year, Buckingham Village accounted for 47 per cent of all prohibition notices issued by DCC.
Between 2018 and 2024, 10 per cent of the 297 properties served with prohibition notices in all of Dublin city were in Buckingham Village, far more than any other housing unit.
In 2024, 24 Buckingham Village flats were under prohibition notices. After this, flats were removed from the list in large numbers. Currently, just one flat remains on the list.
Properties are removed from the prohibition list if a landlord makes the required improvements, a council spokesman said. They are also removed if the units are sold or withdrawn from the rental market.
It is not clear how many Buckingham Village apartments were removed from the prohibition list after being improved. Many of the common areas of the complex are in poor condition, with obstructions in various hallways and some apartments missing door handles.
Some of the lights in the interior windowless hallways do not work, leaving the areas in permanent darkness.
“It needs huge redevelopment,” said Belinda Nugent of the Inner City Organisations Network, which provides advice to tenants about their rights.
Local independent councillor Nial Ring called it “one of the most horrible complexes in the city. It’s a depressing place. It looks dilapidated. It’s been a problem for years.”
Property and company records show many of the apartments were purchased over the years by John McCann, a major property developer who was subject to a €114 million Nama judgment in 2013.
Some were also owned by his brother Declan McCann, who was previously named in the press as a suspect in the IRA’s 1996 bombing of Manchester city centre. He denied the accusation and was never charged.
John McCann’s holdings in Buckingham Village were later transferred to Northside Apartments, a company controlled by two of his daughters. It currently owns around 80 of the 125 units. It is not known how many of these were subject to prohibition notices.
A solicitor for Northside Apartments said “any rectification notices served on the company were promptly rectified and no tenant of the company’s apartments were evicted on foot of any such notice”.
He says the company has no responsibility for the apartments owned by other parties.
