Mr. Patrick Sharkey:

I thank the committee for inviting our group to attend today's meeting.

At the beginning of 2023, the redress focus groups initiative was set up by Ms Roisín Gallagher, Ms Joy Beard, Ms Brenda Tierney-Joyce and Ms Claire McDaid. This initiative saw a public call to our wider community in County Donegal seeking volunteers with a range of skill sets to focus on the many issues we faced resulting from the defective blocks crisis in our county. One such area is that of banking and insurance, which is what our group has been focused and engaging on over the past number of months. The shortcomings of the Government's response to this crisis is leaving our community having to work together to try to make the best of what is an inadequate scheme.

By way of personal introduction, I am an impacted homeowner, with my family home showing all the signs of defective blocks. Relatively speaking, the property is not yet in bad condition, so I am yet to apply for redress and am awaiting details of the enhanced scheme. I volunteered for our group, having experience of working in financial services and harbouring concerns about how banks had not been helping to address the problem.

My wife and I were wrongfully removed from a tracker mortgage by Permanent TSB. We were only restored to a tracker rate after a five-year process through the office of the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman, FSPO. We were overcharged by tens of thousands of euro. In 2019, while the ombudsman's investigation into my rate was ongoing, my mortgage was sold to a vulture fund and is now managed by Pepper on a rate of 7.25% and rising. As we know, Pepper is not a normal lender and I simply do not know how the funding I will need to engage with the redress scheme will be forthcoming.

Moving on, members of our group who have commenced the demolition and rebuilding of their homes will read statements to the committee outlining the dreadful experience they have been through. Their experience highlights the need for mortgage providers to step up and provide interim finance to ensure that homeowners can carry out the initial phases of work pending drawdown of their grants.

In the opening stages of our group's work, we reviewed our standard mortgage terms and conditions. These are terms that apply to all of our mortgages. We were struck by the obligations placed on homeowners regarding maintenance and repair of our homes. Examples of such conditions within the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland, BPFI 's standard terms and conditions include: not to jeopardise or allow any harm to occur to our homes that may in any way depreciate their value; to keep our homes in good and substantial repair; to allow our mortgage providers access to our homes to assess the condition of our homes without them being liable as mortgagees in possession; and to insure and keep insured all parts of the secured assets.

We cannot comply with these covenants when we have defective blocks in our homes.

Our mortgage terms and conditions contain call demand or enforcement events in which the total debt on our mortgages becomes repayable immediately. Section 7.6 of my terms and conditions state that the debt shall become immediately payable to Permanent TSB if my home is either damaged so as to materially depreciate the value of my house as security or where it is demolished. This clause is consistent across all lenders and brings our mortgage providers into the centre of this issue. Clearly, each and every mortgage secured on a defective block home, of which there are many thousands, are in a technical default position. Effectively, until our homes are rebuilt, we are repaying unsecured mortgages. We cannot understand why we are here in 2023 highlighting these clauses and where banks have not offered any support or assistance outside of their business as usual processes. With thousands of effectively unsecured mortgages on their books, this is a problem for banks and mortgage providers as well as for us homeowners.

Our objectives have been as follows: that banks and loan servicing companies put in place dedicated trained staff, policies, procedures and tailored interim finance products to remove the financial barriers to access the scheme; that all impacted homeowners, without exception, are dealt with in conjunction with the vulnerable client processes; that impacted homeowners have a clear and well-publicised way of contacting the dedicated team in each bank; that the bank approval for demolition be based on their assessment and approval of the proposed works to rebuild our homes, and based on professional and independent engineers' reporting; and that the banking and insurance sectors work together to ensure all homeowners are sold appropriate insurance policies, noting that fully comprehensive cover is not possible with a defective block home.

The key measure of the scheme should be to restore our homes in an unambiguous manner to a fully mortgageable condition, leaving no shred of doubt about our homes being fully restored to market value. We believe there are issues regarding proposed rebuild on untested foundations, where there is an outer-leaf replacement or where a semi-detached home may be demolished in isolation from an adjoining property. We have discussed these scenarios with local auctioneers who believe such scenarios will probably not restore the full market value of a property. The repair of our homes must satisfy us as the homeowner and our mortgage provider that full value is restored based on a professional engineer's recommendation. We have very serious concerns as it is becoming clear through scientific research that homeowners will have non-compliant material retained within their homes as per IS EN 12620. This leaves us, as mortgage holders, with a lasting damage default on our mortgages. Such an outcome is not an effective use of taxpayers' money and it highlights the need to do things right. I thank the committee members for their time. I pass over now to Mr. Seán McCabe.