Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am an Independent Deputy for Limerick. My colleague in Dublin, Senator Boyhan, and I are together in this. I am a building contractor and a blocklayer. I understand everything the witnesses are saying, but I will tell them why the core testing has to go ahead. The Government is now pushing a retrofit grant that is going out throughout the country. The grant is to insulate one's house. If one insulates a house with pyrite, it accelerates what is happening. We had 30 people here yesterday from Limerick who have pyrite in their houses and have formed a group. I get two or three phone calls per week from people, because I am a building contractor, to ask me to come to look at their houses and see what are the criteria.

When this first happened, people rang us and asked what they would do. I said to people to seal it up, until somebody got to them, because we did not know what was coming. We did not know what grant aid would be available to people and we told them to seal up the cracks to stop the water getting in, because of the pyrite issue. What has been proven in terms of people who had poor insulation in their houses, such as those houses built in the 1980s which would only have had 40 mm white insulation, is that of the houses that had pyrite and had insulation pumped into their cavities, 90% of them are showing up with pyrite in our country because insulation accelerates what is happening.

If the Government does not allow the core testing to go ahead to make sure there is not pyrite in the houses we are insulating, it is causing a bigger problem in the whole country, because it will accelerate a situation of which it has control. Core testing has to stay there. The lack of engineers we have to test this is also a big problem. The engineers that engineered people's houses on the first day, who were taking the certified blocks and stones were good enough at the time for the banks, institutions and the Government, to meet regulations when they were building their houses. They were good enough to sign off on people's houses and now they are saying they are not good enough to do testing or even be part of testing, or to do core testing and send it to an independent lab in order for us to get fast-tracked results.

On one hand, the Government is looking to insulate houses, which can accelerate the damage caused by pyrite, and, on the other, it is stopping coring to find out if homes have pyrite from going ahead. All the blocks I am talking about came from Clare, which borders Limerick. The problem lies with the quarries used at the time. Some houses have the Clare blocks and some have the Clare infill, that is, pyrite is not in their blocks but in their floors and bursting up through the floors. Some houses have it around the outside, where clause 804 was laid in order to put in the sewers and so on, which is causing the footpaths to burst up. People wonder what is wrong and whether the ground has subsided. It has not. It is the pyrite. The question comes back to the witnesses, and they have answered it a couple of times already. What is their thinking on pumped insulation going into houses that could have pyrite? In any of their cases, has that accelerated the process of pyrite showing out?