Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 May 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Defective Concrete Blocks: Discussion

1:30 pm

Mr. Damien Owens:

The work is ongoing. It just needs to gather pace and be completed as soon as possible. There has been a tremendous opportunity, as some houses have been remediated, to get samples and analyse them in the laboratories. An issue at the start was the lack of laboratory capacity and the delay in getting samples tested. Typically, it took six or seven weeks, which, because of the demand, was pushed out to several months. Maybe there is laboratory capacity in some of our universities, given their geographical locations, that could be used to do local sampling. I am thinking about whatever can be done to increase the rate of testing.