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

I thank Ms Cottier for her presentation. I welcome the creation of the Construction Defects Alliance. A number of members have worked with homeowners over the past five or six years. The first thing that always stands out is that people feel lost and unsure of what to do. They do not know whether they should pay significant sums of money for legal advice, and they are very scared about speaking out publicly because of the implications for them and their families. The fact that there is now a focal point where people can come together, even if they wish to do so anonymously, to get support and information is invaluable, so I commend everybody involved. It adds another voice to the ongoing campaign, because many of us have been speaking about this in the House for two or three years, and the more voices there are, the better.

This is not just my view but that of this committee because we agreed it in the report. It is very important to keep saying this, particularly in light of the response we continually get from Government. It is our view that in the first instance, the developers that were responsible for building shoddy homes should pay. Those of us who put a lot of time and effort into listening not just to people experiencing latent defects but professionals in the field came to that view on the basis of all the information we heard. I say this because from the very first time the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government responded to this report in the Oireachtas to last night on "Drivetime", there is a phrase the Government keeps using, which is that the State cannot take on full liability for all historic latent defects in the State. Nobody has ever asked the State to do that. As a committee, we must emphasise that what is being asked for here is not a blank cheque from the State to take on all liability at all times in all circumstances. In fact, in the first instance, we want the developers to be made pay.

However, the State has a responsibility. As evidence that I do not have much of a social life and spend far too much time reading about these things, I went back and read all of the Oireachtas debates that led to the 1994 legislation. Throughout all of the debates from most of the contributors, they deliberately designed this in such a way as to ensure that the State would have no legal liability and the industry would be trusted to do the right thing. There were Deputies in the House at the time who were proposing an independent inspection regime either by the local authorities or others, which many of us in this committee favour. People kept saying that we could not do that because it would add too much cost onto the developer and place too much liability on the State. They had the option. People in this House urged the State to have the kind of independent regime that many of us recommend in the Safe As Houses? report and the State chose not to do that. It was a deliberate decision so, in fact. Its liability is not just that it did not properly implement the regulations from the 1994 Act but that it designed the Act in such a way that it facilitated some of this behaviour.

Regarding the report's recommendations, it is very important that people understand what we are asking for. What we are asking for in the first instance is something not unlike the Residential Tenancies Board - an independent non-judicial body properly funded by Government to which people who discover latent defects can go and get independent and free legal advice and that has the legal power to bring the parties - affected homeowners and the builders or developers - together and, through mediation or legally binding adjudication, force a resolution. This is not a huge financial undertaking by the State, so even if the State is not going to create a fund, which I will come to, at a very minimum, it could do that. We already have a model that works and the State could do that in the first instance.

I would like the State to explore with the Attorney General whether it is possible to pursue not just the developer if the trading entity is still in existence but the directors of a previous trading entity if they have dissolved that company and created a new building contractor-----