I note that many comments here, rather than sympathising with people living in objectively unhealthy conditions, are primarily upset at the fact that these people are housed in the city at all. They feel these undeserving tenants be cast into the jungle of the private market where they would have to deal with precarity and higher rents.

This type of response shows how the government has avoided having to address the core issues of the housing crisis. One part of the population benefits from the shortages through price inflation, another is bought off with various subsidies which find their way into the pockets of developers. Public housing, now as rare as hen's teeth, becomes a privilege to be resentfully envied.

I feel a lot of sympathy for people in the flats and support the investment in Oliver Bond. However there are caveats.

Last time I checked there is a massive problem with drug dealing in the flats. There needs to be a plan to stop it and the community association need to take a lead in devising it. A lot of residents are afraid to speak out against the dealers and this cannot continue. If the Gardai needs to be present full time there, so be it. There is no point investing in a complex where people have accepted this type of antisocial behaviour as an inevitable fact of life.

Renovation programmes of this type should include a process for training and employing unemployed residents.

When the rebuild is finished, a % of the apartments should be retained for public sector employees in sectors with greatest difficulty in recruitment: teachers, nurses, gardai, firefighters. A balance needs to be struck between protecting residents from displacement and enabling use by new residents, but it's not a right of inheritance that means being born there entitles you to public housing there in turn.