Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I commend the men and women of the DFB and our fire services generally for often putting themselves at risk of harm to keep us safe. Everybody on the committee will agree with me on that.

Part of the purpose of today's session is to look specifically at the Fire Safety in Ireland report and its recommendations. I am mindful that it is important that members of this committee be responsible how we deal with this issue and that we do not engage in scaremongering or frightening people but we have a responsibility to scrutinise the report and the outworking of it. That is the spirit in which I will put questions.

I am interested in both the view of the Department and DFB on Ms Hegarty's suggestion that the terms of reference of the report may have been too limited at the outset, in particular in terms of height and the scope of the issues being addressed. I would welcome information on the rationale as to why those terms of reference were chosen and why, for example, other lower rise multiple unit developments were not included in the original decision because that is important.

I am also interested to hear the view of both fire brigade and the Department on the issues beyond the Grenfell Tower cladding in terms of other systems failures or regulatory failures that have been identified across the water, and some of the changes that have been implemented there as well.

I would like the Department to be explicit with the committee about how many buildings with fire safety risks were identified. What works were required to be done on those buildings and has the work been carried out? A report in The Irish Timesa few weeks ago identified 19 buildings where none of the required works had been done at that point, which is a concern given the report was published early this year. Could they also comment on the progress of the works?

There is a broader issue in terms of whether the existing regulations have been fully complied with. The second is whether the review throws up the need for regulatory change.

Could positive regulatory changes be made learning from the investigations into the Grenfell Tower fire and how the British authorities are dealing with that, as well as the Fire Safety in Ireland report?

The DFB presentation stated it is important that the standards referencing guidance be kept up to date. Is that a soft way of saying some of the standards referenced are not necessarily as current as the fire service would like them? Do the witnesses believe more updating needs to be done with some of those standards to ensure they are as current as needs be?

One of my concerns regarding the regulatory framework is this issue of dwelling houses occupied as single dwellings. I do not know the legislation as well as those on the panel. However, will they explain as clearly as possible the exclusions under the legislation for dwelling houses occupied as single dwellings? Given that these were defined in the 1980s, we are now in a period where even semi-detached or terraced houses are much more interlinked in terms of the construction mechanisms. Can we talk about any dwelling, bar a stand-alone house or bungalow, which is occupied in that way? I am thinking of Millfield Manor in Kildare in that what happens in one house or one apartment is automatically interlinked with others. Is the interpretation of that a problem? Is that an area in which we need legislative change? When I talk to people who live in multi-unit developments, they often express a concern that this particular statutory provision is used by either developers or owners to limit the application of the regulatory framework to protect their interests as inhabitants of single-use dwellings, but they are fundamentally interconnected with their neighbouring dwellings.

Whatever about the inspection regime and SI No. 9/2014, the Building Control (Amendment) Regulations 2014, for multiple use developments, whether residential or commercial, or those kinds of developments that have higher fire safety risks, should we not move to a stage where those buildings are all subject to mandatory fire risk inspections during the construction process, whether it be local authority fire safety inspectors, etc? Given the issues we are dealing with, surely that type of building should be subject to those mandatory inspections.

What is the Department's response to the four recommendations made by Ms Orla Hegarty? When we as politicians talk to residents affected by these matters, the one point they make is that nobody shares information with them. Millfield Manor is a good case in point. The families who owned the homes surrounding the block in Millfield Manor that went on fire were the last to know the outcome of the fire safety inspections. That is the wrong way to do this. How can we improve the communication between people who occupy, or live adjacent to, affected buildings that have fire safety risks in order that they are fully informed at all times of the risks to themselves? The idea that residents in Millfield Manor or Belmayne, for example, have to wait 18 months before they get information that many other people, including departmental, local authority officials and fire safety experts have at an earlier stage, is wrong. We need to think about this can be improved.

We are increasingly encountering constituents in local authority and in private multi-unit developments built at the height of the boom where damp and mould are becoming a significant problem. It is not just in the big urban areas but in rural towns. The standard response in a local authority setting, for example, is that this is a lifestyle issue. My local authority has a wonderful booklet which tells one should not put one’s clothes hanging on dryers and so forth. While all of that is true, it is clear that failure to comply with building standards, certainly pre-2014, has created structural problems in many of these buildings. We need to have an informed discussion on Government and local authority policy to deal with that issue. Simply throwing it back on the residents telling them to use their dryer less, even if they are not doing that, is not an adequate response. We have a structural problem we need to discuss. If the panel could briefly comment on this, we might return to it at a later stage.