u/johnpaulsmith1996

​Hi,

​I’m looking for advice or to hear from anyone who has experience dealing with Dublin City Council completely ignoring their own mandatory deadlines across both FOI requests and official internal complaints.

​Long story short, I am dealing with a severe, ongoing estate management/tenancy breach issues. To try and get answers, I have been fighting them on two fronts, and they have entirely shut down communication.

I submitted an FOI request for internal files regarding the handling of my case. DCC entirely missed their statutory timeline, issued completely contradictory refusal letters without proper justification. I have already bypassed them and lodged a formal appeal with the Office of the Information Commissioner, which is currently at the intake/validation phase.

Dcc have also blown past ​Internal Complaint Deadlines on the local housing side, Customer Services formally logged my escalation under an official complaint appeal reference number, explicitly stating in writing that the Housing Office had a mandatory directive to respond to me within 15 working days. That strict deadline expired yesterday, and they have maintained complete radio silence.

​This morning, I formally escalated the entire matter to the Chief Executive, the Assistant Chief Executive of Housing, and CC'd all my local area councillors to put maximum political and executive pressure on them.

​If DCC continues to ignore the timeline and refuses to respond even after a top-down escalation, what are the next best steps from a legal or administrative standpoint?

​Has anyone successfully used the Office of the Ombudsman to break through DCC's radio silence on estate management failures?

​For those who had councillors submit a formal Councillor's Question to the manager at local area committee meetings, did that actually force DCC to act, or did they just give a boilerplate PR response?

​Are there any other statutory or legal routes worth pursuing when a local authority completely refuses to follow its own customer charters and statutory timelines?

​Appreciate any insights or experiences people have had regarding pushing back against this level of council stonewalling. Thanks.

I am currently in the midst of an foi request to fingal county council regarding a married couple who i share a back wall with that fight, argue and shout at all hours of the night. For context most of the houses on my street are social houses hence why I am putting the request forward to the council.

I want to find complaints from other neighbours about these specific neighbours (with names and personal information of these neighbours redacted) so it can help me if i decide to go the civil court route.

What I want to know is if someone has previous experience with putting FOI requests to Fingal County Council or any other councils around issues like this and has it been successful ?