Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for both their presence and their presentations. It is important to remind us all about the impetus for us calling this hearing. The witnesses will all recall when we were undertaking our informal scrutiny of the enhanced defective blocks legislation, Aidan O’Connell from Engineers Ireland gave some pretty shocking testimony to the committee when he informed us that: "I do know certain quarries that are still producing concrete blocks and still producing material and that it is wholly unsatisfactory and they continue to do it knowing that material is wholly unsatisfactory." He went on to say: "I can also say that I have other cases where those houses have been built in recent years and they are demonstrating damage and the same material is present in both those properties." That is the same material as deleterious materials affecting homes in Donegal, Mayo and elsewhere. He also said that he believed some quarries were carrying out what he described as "side deals" with homeowners as the quarries "recognise they have a problem". He concluded his remarks by saying: "They [the quarries] are suppressing the information and some of the damage and doing some side deals with home owners." Given that we got that testimony when we were considering the defective blocks legislation and that the working group report estimated that the cost of cleaning up the mess is €2.4 billion, the witnesses can imagine the concern of the committee. What a number of us are interested in doing here today is trying to establish to what extent the kind of testimony from the likes of Mr. O'Connell, who is a respected professional engineer, and those practices are still prevalent in the industry but, more importantly, whether the compliance and enforcement regime is fit for purpose. Is it identifying those cases of non-compliance and addressing them?

I appreciate that this is technical stuff, but I ask the witnesses to treat us as if we are leaving certificate science students for the ease of explaining it to us because we and the wider public want to get beyond some of the technical information and into some of the more general processes. We want to understand the system. I am still not clear on the exact roles of the various organisations. One of my questions for Mr. Ó Coigligh relates to the fact that the Department is titled as the "notifying authority" and a range of other organisations are the "notifying bodies". There are building control sections. I want to understand in plain, simple English who is responsible for what in the chain of compliance and enforcement because that is important for us to understand.

The second point is that we want to know how widespread people in this room think these problems are. The public deserve an honest assessment of the extent to which we still believe quarries are non-compliant. I am interested to hear, preferably from the Department, if it has the information, how many quarries we have supplying the building industry. How many of those are licensed, because a non-licensed quarry indicates a particular attitude to the rule book? To what extent are quarries being inspected and to what extent are the inspections indicating a level of compliance? Does anybody in this room have a picture of what is happening across the State beyond the information that Ms Phelan and her team have given us?

Senator Fitzpatrick asked some good questions. I would like to know how many products have been removed, when they were removed and whether the suppliers of those products are still supplying products elsewhere. Perhaps Mr. Ó Coigligh could grapple with some of those questions initially and then I will pass some questions on to the other witnesses.