Private landlords to be targeted following large gathering in Limerick estate
PRIVATE landlords who own properties in the Castletroy area of the city are expected to come under pressure to control the behaviour of their tenants in the wake of what happened at College Court earlier this week.
Chief Superintendent Gerard Roche made his comments at a meeting of the Limerick Joint Policing Committee this Friday.
During the virtual meeting, he also confirmed that five individuals have been issued with "substantial fines" after they were identified as being the organisers of house parties on Tuesday night.
A further 16 fines were issued to individuals who attended the parties while more than 30 fines were issued to people who were "outside of their areas".
Gardai made five arrests on the night and five vehicles were seized. A significant quantity of cocaine was seized during a separate-but-related operation.
Chief Superintendent Roche said early indications suggest the scenes at Carysfort Avenue which were widely shared on social media were not pre-planned.
"We were actually out there in the UL campus dealing with stuff that was going on in the campus when we got the call that this had set up. They (students) were coming and going all day which they always do but they set up in about half an hour and then we got our resources there - and we put in a huge amount of resources - and they dispatched fairly quickly as you saw," he said.
Dr Pat Daly, Chief Executive of Limerick City and County Council, told the meeting its enforcement teams were deployed to College Court the following morning and that numerous fines were issued for littering and waste-related offences.
"We are hitting them on all sides. We issued fines for waste and litter offences, we issued warnings and we had our team in to clean up," he said.
"We have issued fines for illegal bin services and we continue to do a lot of spot checking in conjunction with An Garda Siochána. We are making sure that they are getting it from all sides so local residents can get some comfort from that," he added.
Chief Supt Roche said there have been a number drugs seizures in the College Court area over the past year and that individual landlords have to take some responsibility for what is happening in the estate.
"We will be making contact with every one of those owners with a view to putting pressure on them to regulate their own houses," he said.
"There are a number of houses there where we have got drugs over the last year and we will be putting the onus back on the owners of those houses for allowing them to be used like that and we will investigate them, under the criminal law, for allowing that to happening," added Chief Supt Roche.
Files may also be prepared to for the Director of Public Prosecutions in the case of landlords who are suspected of allowing house parties to take place in breach of the current Covid regulations.
Separately, efforts will be made to identify the landlords who have no registered their properties with the Residential Tenancies Board.