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

Reference was made to fire alarms. A person was trying to insure their detached house recently and they would only be allowed to insure it if they were connected directly to the local fire station from the house. The system they were looking to connect to their house would have cost over €3,000 in order to have that direct connection. However, another part of the policy said that unless it was a commercial business, the house could not be connected to a fire station.

When we look at the regulations for any house up to today's standards, there have to be fire alarms, smoke detectors in the kitchen areas and so on. What thatched cottages have been put through is unbelievable. This goes back to my first point. It was said there are 2,000 thatched houses in Ireland but I would say there are fewer. I know many people who had thatched houses and they were trying to do work to them but they eventually said they were stopping and those houses have fallen in. I witnessed the roofs of two such houses fall in last year. The local authority came and told the owners they had to fix the house but they did not have the money to feed their own family and look after their own house. The local authority was asking them to put money into a house where the grant systems were not available because the local authority only had a small pool of money to travel a whole county.

Take Adare, for example. How much revenue does Adare bring in for the Government? Why do people come? It is because they see the line of thatched cottages as they drive into Adare. Unfortunately, a few years ago one of the thatched cottages burned down. There was a family living in it at the time. I was a member of the council then. A number of meetings were held about the thatched building and what would be taken in charge by someone else, and insurance was the big obstacle. It goes back to my first point. If the Government is serious about our heritage and about listing houses and buildings, such as those that are thatched, it has to provide the insurance for it. God forbid, but if any of us were struck by a car tomorrow and the person driving had no insurance, we would be covered because the Government has insurance in place. For something like our heritage, there is nothing. We want people to be able to live in these houses if they want to. There is a lovely thatched house up the road from where I was living in Dromin. The owner's family lived there and he built next door. When his parents died, the house was rented out. People are living in it now. It is fabulous to see a family with children in it. There are criteria around what they can and cannot do with it. We have some fantastic buildings in this country. The failure of the Government to protect them and to protect the people who own them is evident. We are down to 2,000 or less. The inaction means that we could have a lot less. Trying to find a person to thatch a house or to source the proper reed is difficult. The reed is being imported now. We are not using our own reed that we have here because fewer and fewer people are doing it. Looking at the witnesses, I am happy to see people of a young age taking on this work. Often, we look across the table and we see people who have been trying to protect the home that they grew up in for their whole lives, into their 70, 80s or 90s. They do this because their homes are their heritage and they are the culture of all of their families. It is great to see young people here today who are seeking to protect thatched buildings for the next generation. The Government needs to look at the issue, and look at it properly. It must ensure that our thatched houses are protected. Funding must be provided to protect the houses that people cannot afford to protect for the future. The houses should be brought back into use. They are saying we have a housing crisis. There are houses there that could be used to accommodate people if there was a bit of blue-sky thinking to get them back into production. We need to leave something for the next generation, so that they can live in our shoes and those of the generations before us. Everyone is on laptops and phones at the moment. What is the one thing that they crave? Look at the Americans, for example. When they come into this country, the one thing they want is to go back in time, to 100 years ago. They want to stay in old houses and live life as it was years ago, even if it is only for one week. That is what they crave. It is one thing to protect thatched cottages, but we can actually have something unique in this country, that we can offer to people who come here. We can use it to generate employment and tourism, and protect our heritage at the same time. I encourage the Minister to come in, and to look at funding to protect all of the thatched houses.

I know of a couple who were living in a protected house, onto which they built an extension after getting planning permission. However, the insurer would not insure the front part of the house because it had a timber ceiling that dated back many years. It would only insure the extension. The couple were starting out in life and had bought and extended the property. They were willing to keep the streetscape, put in the sash windows and make sure the front of the house looked at it did previously but the local authority was more worried about the timber ceiling inside the house that nobody else would see unless they called to the house. Perhaps 50 people, who were friends of the family, would have seen the ceiling each year. The local authority thought more about protecting the timber ceiling than helping the couple. The authority decided that the timber ceiling could be taken down, one timber at a time, and the ceiling could be fire-proofed and reassembled. The cost of these extra works, to a small town house in the streetscape owned by a young couple, was €8,000, just to make sure that the house could be insured. That is ludicrous.