Bathroom sink drama in council flats

Dublin's Pearse House council flats, on Pearse St, have finally had sinks installed in the bathrooms, 60-odd years after they were built.

But the sinks, installed under a €2 million programme initiated by then Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen, have only one tap with cold running water.

Cullen visited Pearse House in March 2004, and the local residents' committee showed him a typical bathroom in the flats, with just a toilet and shower, and no sink. He was "gobsmacked", remembers Anne Larkin of the local development group.

On 18 May 2004, a few weeks prior to the local elections, Cullen again visited Pearse House to announce a special allocation of €2 million in funding to Dublin City Council, for the installation of sinks in the flats' bathrooms.

"I consider that the provision of a wash-hand basin is a basic facility in this day and age and I asked my officials, in partnership with the Dublin City Council to correct the issue," said Cullen.

The council has since installed cold-water sinks in 1,200 flats across the city, including the 345 flats in Pearse House.

When the sinks were installed, residents found they had just one tap – a cold tap. Despite this, local resident Brigid Walsh says, "we were delighted to get the sinks anyway".

"In this day and age, maybe some people would like hot water, and fair play to them," she says. "But if you're without a sink for so long you just get on with it.

"I know we're all coming into modern-day living now and people would have said we were left behind, but that's what we fought for and we got it. They're not a luxury, but they're practical."

According to a spokesperson for Dublin City Council, installing sinks with hot and cold water would have been more costly and time consuming, and was unnecessary under the building regulations.

The minimum requirements in the building regulations stipulate that a bathroom must have a sink with cold water. The Council were bringing the flats "up to the building regulation requirements of today", he said.

The bathrooms are so small that, in order to install the sinks, they had to adjust the bathroom doors so that they would open outwards rather than inwards. There was no room to fit a hot water heater under the sink, and any other method of piping hot water to the sinks would have required extensive and expensive rewiring, he said.

"The funding I am providing to the City Council today shows this Government's continued commitment to the people of Dublin, especially the residents of the inner city, many of whom are living in flats complexes", said Martin Cullen, announcing the commencement of the programme last May.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Environment said that, in such programmes, the Department allocated the money and it was a matter for the local authority to administer the scheme.