If you own an apartment or a unit in a managed estate, you are a member of a company — the owners’ management company that owns your common areas, insures your building and bills your service charge, governed by both the Companies Act 2014 and the Multi-Unit Developments Act 2011. Around 8,000 of them run Irish residential life, mostly on volunteer boards, and their disputes are chronic, predictable — and far more solvable than either side usually realises. This is the machinery, honestly mapped.
Mary Molloy Solicitors are solicitors, not accountants or tax advisers. Nothing on this page is tax, accounting or financial advice — engage your accountant on those questions, and both advisers together where matters straddle the line. Company law procedures, CRO practice and filing deadlines change frequently, and reform of the law governing owners’ management companies and charities is ongoing; confirm the current position before acting on anything here.
The Dispute Map
- Service charges and sinking funds: charges never approved at a meeting, budgets opaque, arrears in both directions — the deepest file: service charge & sinking fund disputes;
- Repairs and maintenance refused or neglected — the obligations, and the s.24 route when correspondence fails;
- AGMs and information: meetings never held, annual reports never issued, members starved — s.17’s requirements and what members can demand;
- Governance and control: voting structures, director tenure beyond s.16’s three-year limit, boards entrenched or absent — the governance practice;
- Strike-off: the OMC dissolved for non-filing, with title and insurance chaos following — and the special 6-year restoration window;
- The developer legacy: common areas never transferred, developments never completed — the untransferred common areas problem;
- Defects and remediation: the OMC as the vehicle for apartment remediation scheme applications — run with our construction law practice, with public-law challenges via our judicial review practice.
The Machinery: Section 24 and Mediation
The MUD Act’s dispute engine is section 24: exclusive Circuit Court jurisdiction, standing for any person with rights or obligations under the Act, and wide remedial discretion — with the court empowered to direct the parties to mediation, a direction that binds. That design suits these disputes perfectly: owner and OMC remain neighbours afterwards, and most OMC files should run mediation-first with the s.24 application as the visible backstop. The full walkthrough: section 24 explained. Reform is coming too — OMC regulation transferring to Housing, a Housing Agency unit committed, service-charge regulations in drafting — and positions taken now should anticipate it: what’s coming.
An OMC Problem - From Either Chair?
Owner or board member: one call maps the obligations, the machinery and the route that leaves the block functioning.
Call 01 5827148