Transparency in the way council housing is allocated and the HSE rent allowance scheme is administered has been called for by the members of the Ballinrobe electoral area committee who feel Ballinrobe have more than their fair share of social housing.
The local councillors told an HSE welfare officer on Monday that some residents in Ballinrobe estates were causing mayhem for others and it was a belief that they were Mayo County Council tenants. However, it has since come to their attention that many of these offenders are being financially assisted by the HSE and are not council tenants at all.
The councillors wanted the issue of how housing is allocated to be clarified and have now called for more interlinking between the two authorities, with Garda involvement to ensure that anyone who violates a property is not allocated another one.
Gabriel Irwin, superintendent welfare officer with the HSE, explained that the HSE don’t place people in houses, the people place themselves and then the HSE supply them with rent allowance should they meet the criteria. He said most people who apply to them for assistance do so because they have lost their jobs and are struggling to pay rent or mortgages and the only criterion they must satisfy is a means test.
He confirmed that the HSE are financing 74 tenants in the Ballinrobe area. He said they don’t finance local authority tenants and added that the names of all the people they are assisting are forwarded to the council.
County wide the HSE are assisting about 2,000 people, 600 of those in each of Ballina and Castlebar and approximately 300 in Westport. He said Ballinrobe was at the lower end of the scale as people tended to gravitate towards larger urban centres rather than rural towns like Ballinrobe.
Cllr Patsy O’Brien said confusion existed as to whether troublesome tenants were HSE assisted or placed by Mayo County Council. He accused the HSE and the local authority of not being transparent or open in their business and said their day-to-day dealings were a “backdoor system”.
Mr Irwin said that the fact that HSE tenants were causing mayhem in estates, as claimed by Cllr Ryan, was a matter for the Gardaí.
Senior executive officer with Mayo County Council Mr Padraic Flanagan explained that the HSE is operating a scheme that was designed at national level, a scheme which is demand-driven. He said there is a high social welfare dependency in Ballinrobe, “that is a fact of life”. He said nobody on social welfare could afford the €150 per week standard rent being charged for a house in Ballinrobe and added that it was only a small population of tenants who were causing problems.
But Cllr O’Brien asked why people would want to live in a council house when they can get rent allowance from the HSE and move into a brand new house. “One hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing,” he added.
Chairman of the Ballinrobe area committee Cllr Harry Walsh said a small number of offenders were giving everyone a bad name.
Cllr Ryan proposed that a committee should be set up by the Minister for Housing Michael Finneran in each electoral area to include representatives of the local authority, elected members, representatives of the HSE, local gardaí and the community welfare officer to make the system more transparent. He added if a tenant violates a property in one local authority area they shouldn’t be housed in another area. Cllr Ryan said a huge number of criteria must be met for local authority housing while the HSE only carried out a means test. “This is not acceptable. The Gardaí should be part of the whole housing process and people should be properly vetted. Their records should follow them from one area to another,” he concluded.
