Dr. Martina Cleary:

I am the founder of the Clare Pyrite Action Group. My apologies for the late and altered opening statement. After two years of arduous campaigning for inclusion in this scheme and only two working days to prepare for the meeting on behalf of County Clare, the committee may understand it was difficult to decide exactly what to say in five minutes.

I am an ordinary homeowner put in an extraordinary situation. On 10 August 2020, I stood outside my modest bungalow in County Clare and listened to an engineer explain that there were suspected defective concrete blocks in my home. It could be pyrite or mica and only core testing would tell. The problem was serious and degenerative, and could not be repaired. It was a serious structural defect that would only worsen over time and no assistance was available to me in County Clare. Assistance was only available to homeowners in counties Mayo and Donegal. It is impossible to fully explain the impact of getting this news to somebody who has not been on this journey. It hits you in the gut. It is a sickening, prolonged and toxic anxiety. It involves sleepless nights and lying awake wondering how long you have and how much time before your home becomes dangerous. The fear of your own home grows and becomes an almost obsessional routine of checking for evolving damage. Your life changes as you become alienated from what used to be normal reality and the shadow of this is always present, disrupting your whole life, your family life and your community.

I will tell the eminent members of the committee that this problem my not yet be in their counties but it is coming. We currently know of defective concrete blocks, or suspicions of same, in 12 counties along the western and eastern seaboards. It is likely a problem in every county. The decisions the committee comes to and the recommendations it makes will be instrumental in influencing how this crisis plays out among members' constituents, neighbours, friends and family. They may have defective concrete blocks in their homes and do not realise it. Do not let the situation play out elsewhere as it did in Donegal and Mayo.

Once I recovered from the initial shock of the discovery, next came the questions. How could this happen? How could the most fundamental, taken for granted, mundane thing, that is, a humble concrete block, be crumbling inside the walls of my house? A concrete block should last for 100 years. If we are to look at our built environment, houses are intact that were built decades ago. As an academic and researcher, my default mode is to investigate and to find answers, if there are any. Somebody had to be responsible; something had to be done; something had gone wrong somewhere. That engineer admitted he had visited at least 40 to 50 houses with the same problem in the Clare-Limerick area. However, beyond that he would say no more due to what he termed a conflict of interest. This was my first but not my last encounter with what I describe as avoidance of the elephant in the room. I was to encounter many such moments in the months that followed and due to the scale and influence of our main supplier in County Clare, CRH Roadstone, I would encounter several such conflicts of interest.

On 4 September 2020, I founded the Clare Pyrite Action Group with a membership of one. I was inspired by what I learned of the action groups in Mayo and Donegal. When you find yourself in this situation, you quickly realise that the ordinary homeowner has nowhere else to go. In the first month, I tried to find help and advice from the local authority, the pyrite remediation board, local solicitors and local Deputies. I even wrote to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. I was passed from one office to the next and from one dead end to another. The resounding response was that there is no pyrite in County Clare and no help was available. I was alone.

However, within two months of setting up Clare Pyrite Action Group, I had been approached by 25 similarly impacted homeowners. Within six months, that number had doubled. Today, because of the research I have conducted on the ground among our membership, I am aware of 1,025 private homes with confirmed or suspected issues. The homes impacted include homes on 17 private housing estates, five local authority housing estates and 11 public and private dwellings. This is only the beginning. There is most definitely pyrite in the concrete blocks of County Clare.

On 14 June 2022, the Government finally admitted that was the case and Clare was allowed access to the DCB grant scheme. It was a milestone achievement for every person who has worked hard to secure this admission over the past two years. It is a moment to acknowledge this accomplishment after the arduous and extraordinarily difficult process through which we have been put. We have followed carefully all of the things that are happening and the response of the people in Mayo and Donegal to the issue and we are worried. We had to watch from the sidelines because we were excluded from the working group negotiations and had no input to the terms and conditions of this new scheme. Clare met the IS 465 qualification in July 2021 in the submission to the Department. We met fully and rigorously the criteria that had qualified 150 homes in Mayo for the scheme. I can only speculate, and forgive me if I am wrong, that this was a strategic and deliberate delaying strategy to ensure the interim conditions and new qualification criteria would be introduced to limit and prevent as many of us as possible from entering the scheme. I point in that regard to the damage threshold, which is of particular concern to us.

The statements of the eminently qualified witnesses who will contribute to the follow-on panels this afternoon arrived around midnight last night. As I read their biographies, I could not help but reflect on the extraordinary situation we are in today. We, the ordinary homeowners, are facing the full power of the State, all of its resources and its ability to secure the most qualified and professional voices from the most established and respected bodies in the country. They are all working on behalf of the State to ensure its position will be unquestionable and upheld. It is impossible not to feel that we, the homeowners who are the victims, are on trial, and for what? For daring to expect more? For daring to demand more? For expecting that the homes we have worked hard to pay for and continue to pay for should stay standing around us?

We expected oversight of regulation to ensure that the blocks used to build our homes would be sound and enforced. We have been let down on so many levels, particularly by the State, which continues to fail in its duty to do right by its citizens, the ordinary workers and taxpayers of this country who are impacted by this issue. That is us; the people sitting before the committee today.

I received a text message recently from an engineer who had been there on the first day-----