Mr. Koen Verbruggen:

Mr. Ó Coigligh laid out the series of research funded by the Department. That has been managed by Geological Survey Ireland. Feeding into the committees, there are four research programmes under way at the moment, separate to some of the ones run by the NSAI. I will very quickly go through them and the timing. There is a report by a company called SLR on pyrite reactivity based on petrography. We have a draft of the report already and we should have a finalised copy this quarter. There is a report by a company in the UK called Petrolab which is a metadata analysis of work it has done on samples received both in respect of defective concrete blocks and conveyancing, which would be potentially undamaged. We expect to have a report on that before the end of the year. We already have a draft report.

The work on accelerated ageing that Ms Larkin referred to takes 225 days so the Deputy can understand that will take longer. It will potentially be the end of the first quarter of 2024 or the second quarter when we have those results. The largest research project is the one being led by Ulster University and Paul Dunlop. That involves a consortium of several of experts, some of whom were referred to earlier, from Canada, Switzerland, the United States and Norway. That is looking at a broad review of damage mechanisms around mica versus pyrite versus pyrrhotite issues. That is €500,000 and is funded to run to up to three years, but interim results are expected from that before the end of this year.