Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My contribution will follow on from that of the previous contributor. I completely support the principle of funding homeowners. I have heard the absolute pain and annoyance of Mr. Nugent and Mr. Mulhern and I stand in complete sympathy with them. I have experience of trying to get a group of owners to pony up for engineering costs to establish fault in an estate of houses, one of which was my home, and one homeowner did not row in which meant that the rest of us had to pitch in and pay. That is all the more difficult in an apartment complex. I completely sympathise with all of the difficulty and annoyance of that.

On the other hand, I can see why the proposal is for a loan regime, albeit that is unfair, in particular, to owner-occupiers who own only one property. However, in the case of professional or institutional landlords with more than one property, if the Government was to provide grants, it would become disproportionate and may open the floodgates. Will Ms Ní Fhloinn address how to discriminate legally so that the people who really need money are prioritised and given grant aid? The unfairness will be colossal if that does not happen. I would value Ms Ní Fhloinn's opinion on that.

To elaborate a little on Senator Moynihan's view, has consideration been given to something akin to a tax clearance certificate that attaches to an individual in construction whereby the individual must produce a defect clearance certificate? That may be a way to overcome a temptation for phoenix syndrome within construction to avoid retrospective liabilities. Has any consideration been given to that?

Should we consider a scheme of certificates of compliance to certify a development as free of construction defects? That might incentivise management companies to have blocks of apartments declared free of defects or to encourage those blocks of apartments to have themselves declared free of defects, assuming we have some sort of a funding regime in place. Would that encourage people to declare where there are deficits and address them and then get this certificate and all of the insurance that would flow from it?

Finally, from an insurance point of view, has consideration been given to a State underwriting regime of some sort? I appreciate that is all very pie in the sky but, at the same time, in principle, I am happy to advocate for it.