Dominic Hannigan (Meath East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This debate has been a long time coming. I was glad to hear the firmness in the Minister's statement today and I will go into the details of that later on in my speech. The families who are sitting in the Visitors Gallery watching this today have all been waiting a long time for some resolution. They want answers. They do not want to just sit here and listen to a debate today. They came here to get a resolution. They are the ones who are living with the pyrite problem day in and day out. They have been tirelessly campaigning for a resolution of this issue. I know from meeting with the pyrite action group the amount of selfless, hard work many people involved in the group carry out to make sure this campaign keeps going.

The Minister of State and I are very aware of this problem. Unfortunately, it affects many of our constituents in Meath. We both know that estates in places like Ashbourne, Dunshaughlin and other towns are suffering from the pyrite issue. It must be noted that the Minister of State has done a lot of work on this issue but we are not there yet, although we are near a resolution. I find it very difficult to see a family's home being ripped apart by pyrite. I know how important a house is to a family and the pride that families take in their homes. I understand how difficult it is to have a house where windows do not sit in their frames, doors are leaning forward, gaps are appearing all the time and cracks in the walls are so big that one could fit one's hand into them. When one sees these problems in people's houses, one understands the constant fear the families are living in. One understands that when they go to bed or go to work, they worry that there might be another extension of the cracks . It they have children, they might worry about the impact of this on them. We all want to feel safe in our homes, especially families with children, but it must be very difficult when one goes to bed not trusting the very foundations of the house one is living in. This is the harsh reality for people not just in County Meath, but in other counties around Dublin as well. The Minister knows that these people bought their homes in good faith and were unlucky but it is time that this good faith was rewarded.

Since this problem began, I have been working with the Minister and have submitted a number of parliamentary questions to try to find a resolution. He will know from receiving many questions from me on this issue that nobody will be satisfied by a quick-fix solution. We all agree that when the pyrite panel was announced, a roadmap would provide us with the way forward and a way out of this nightmare for people suffering from this problem. I remember meeting with the pyrite panel in the Custom House on a number of occasions over the past few months, listening to what it was planning to do and giving feedback. Three months after the recommendations of the report and three weeks after the end of consultation with the relevant stakeholders, it is time we gave the people some answers and the Minister gave some of these this afternoon.

I am happy that the terms of reference for the resolution board are currently being drawn up and will be ready next week. I am also happy that a levy is going to be imposed on those who should bear the brunt for the mistakes they have made and not the home owners. It is not fair to expect home owners to pay for this. However, like previous speakers, I am concerned that the levy will not start to bring in money for some time. The worry is that we might not see people getting the resolution they need for many years. Can we look at sourcing other forms of finance for this? We could then use the levy as a way of paying the money back. There are options that the Minister might like to consider, such as looking at the National Pensions Reserve Fund and seeing whether there might be money available from that source. Alternatively, we could go to the European Investment Bank or other sources of finance and ask for a short-term loan which could then be paid off when the levy starts to bring in money.

There is the opportunity here to create jobs in the construction sector. People will need skilled construction workers to carry out the repair work so we can get some of them off the dole and back into employment. It would also give them a chance to gain new employment afterwards with their renewed skills so there are a number of benefits here. We could help reduce the number of people who are unemployed while at the same time giving resolution to the families in the Gallery who have been waiting a long time for this. I urge the Minister to look at ways of funding this in the short term through a loan so that people can rest assured that we are going to bring about a solution to this nightmare they are living through.

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