Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

If one wants to prove that one has pyrite the competent person will be an engineer who will come out and write a report. I have seen the bills for those reports. In some cases they run into a couple of thousand euro. Is the Minister saying that somebody has to spend €2,000 or more, in some cases, to get a report that confirms what is obvious and then claim an exemption that may be significantly less than the amount they have spent on the report? That is just daft. It is a fig leaf for an exemption that people expected. It was expected that people who qualified for the household charge, who were talked into putting their names on the database to claim an exemption from the household charge, would continue to be exempt.

The amount of work done for the €5 million is valuable but very insignificant compared to the overall problems on some of these estates. The Minister has not taken into account the fact that some of these estates have disimproved over the past year. I could bring him to places where the security fence that is supposed to keep people off the building site has fallen over, and show him where lights were off throughout the winter. Those are not improvements. Apart from anything else they are very temporary. This has a direct bearing on the value of the properties. In some cases they are of no value because they cannot be sold. One would want to be mad to buy something that is going to cause problems in the future.

If people have to pay a property tax they must prove that they have paid the household charge. Earlier this year there was chaos because the Local Government Management Agency was not able to prove who had paid and who had not. It admitted to making errors in tens of thousands of cases. This whole project will cause major problems.

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