Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will be very quick. I apologise to the Minister as I will have to run in order to ask a parliamentary question so I may not be here for his reply. However, I will look at the transcript afterwards.

I want to deal with the issue of accountability and the extent of the Department's interest in warnings that were given. Problems might have been apparent to the Department much sooner. First, let us remember that this has come out because several of the schools were repeatedly blocked by the Department in efforts to get building control reports. That is what they claimed last year when this came up. Several schools said they were looking for the reports on building control because they had concerns about fire safety and were repeatedly blocked by the Department. That would suggest to me that the Department, the Government or the Minister did not want to know. They wanted to say they had delivered all these schools and did not want anyone to mess up the good-news story by letting it out that there were massive problems with them. When I questioned the then Minister, Deputy Bruton, in this committee, he said there were minor problems. Then there were delays and we had to prod early last year. We had been promised that the fire safety audit would be done by January of this year but by March, only one school had been checked. Then a story was printed in The Irish Timesand things began to move along. There is evidence of foot-dragging and not taking this seriously, and all of that needs to be investigated.

One of the issues I raised in September last year, tipped off by building workers to whom I will come back in my questions, concerned a college of further education built by Western Building Systems in north Dublin, which I understand was closed down in 2014. That college, a scandal in itself, is still sitting there empty. Why was it closed down? I understand there was subsequently legal action taken by the Office of Public Works, OPW. Was a red flag not raised when the OPW had to close the school and initiate legal action against WBS in 2014? Was this not a warning that there was a problem with these guys and that everything else they do should be examined?

We need answers. I do not know if the details of the case are sub judicebut we need to know everything that we possibly can. Was this not a warning to the Department? Without going into too much detail, did the issues relate to structural defects in the College of Further Education building in Whitehall? If so, why did alarm bells not immediately ring in the context of Western Business Systems?

As Deputy Coppinger alluded to, whistleblowers in the building industry have prodded us to raise issues they have outlined - not just in the context of the schools programme but also regarding building sites generally - to us and to the former Minister, Ruairí Quinn. When the latter was Minister for Education and Skills, people went to the trouble of joining his branch of the Labour Party in Ringsend. Some even did so before Labour got into government in anticipation of him becoming Minister. People repeatedly attended branch meetings in the succeeding years and warned him that the schools building programme was like the wild west due to the fact that there was no oversight, bogus subcontractors were used and there was rampant bogus self-employment. Building workers from Dublin or the south could not get jobs on these building sites. People would laugh at anyone who tried to do so. Gangs of workers who were bogus self-employed were brought down from the North.

I have been told - perhaps the Minister can confirm it is not true - that many of the contractors had stopped paying for wall ties prior to this. That may answer the mystery as to the lack of wall ties. The ties themselves are cheap. Previously, bricklayers and building workers were paid for the ties but, as part of cutbacks, their employers stopped paying them for the ties. However, the tie is the most elementary thing that stops a wall coming apart. One does not have a wall if one does not use a wall tie. It is really elementary and the employers stopped paying the workers for wall ties.

Building workers and officials met the former Minister, Ruairí Quinn, and Department officials in Tullamore and at the head office of the Department of Education and Skills on Marlborough Street in 2012 or 2013. They told him that the schools building programme was like the wild west due to a complete lack of oversight and control. At all of these meetings they just met a brick wall from the Department.