Ms Martina Hegarty:

Mr. Houton can partly answer that question. From my perspective, anyone who picks up the phone and contacts a contractor will find that no one is willing to give a quote. Where a contractor does give a quote, it is €200 plus per square foot. My house is less than 1,000 sq. ft. in size. It is ridiculous to think it will cost me over €200,000 to rebuild my home, and the cost is only getting higher.

The problem is I will not get €200,000 from the Government. I will get approximately €160,000 and maybe even less. I may also have to pay engineering fees of €15,000. Mr. Campbell is available on video link. We have gone through, item by item, every single aspect that it will take to rebuild our homes and the rates available are not workable.

As Mr. Houton said, on the materials side, the costs are moving. One of the big concerns about the scheme is that homeowners will be tied to a timeframe to rebuild their homes. That is not doable right now. I had homeowners ringing me last night in panic because they were approved for the scheme last year. They are waiting to start their rebuild. They were hopeful, as the rest of us were, that all of the time and effort put in over the past year would be productive. They are now panicking because they have only two months left to rebuild their house.

To be honest, everything in the scheme is anti-homeowner. There are no key performance indicators, KPIs, or timelines set for any local authority or housing agency. The timelines, the criteria and every single other aspect are set for the homeowner, and they are set for the homeowner to fail.