Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

This motion is given added poignancy by the disaster in Grenfell in London, and I extend my sympathies to all affected. What it showed was class, race and, as has been said, corporate manslaughter, and one of the issues is the outsourcing of public housing to private companies, a process which is happening here. The Dáil and the housing committee in particular should get a report and an update from the Minister. We heard some bullet points tonight but we need to interrogate this. Tens of thousands of people in the country are affected by the poor building regulations and the self-regulating that developers have been allowed to do. This stems from the close connections of these developers, in particular to the two big parties historically. It has led to the likes of what we have heard about today, with hundreds of residents in Beacon South Quarter in Sandyford picking up the tab of between €15,000 and €30,000 per apartment to address deficiencies in fire safety, water, ingress and structure. The fact developers are allowed to become insolvent and then re-trade, move along their merry way and set up somewhere else is completely unacceptable.

The motion references pyrite as a sole example of where remedy has been brought to bear. This was down to years of campaigning, since 2009 and even earlier, by residents and some public representatives. There are still thousands of residents who have an element of pyrite who are stuck in limbo and who only have stage 1, which may never progress and probably will not progress, but they cannot sell their houses. People heard one resident on "Morning Ireland" on Monday, a resident of my estate where hundreds of houses, including my own, suffer from pyrite but the developer, Shannon Homes, still operates. Nothing can be done.

I am not as benign about the Fianna Fáil amendment as Deputy Ó Broin, because the amendment removes the section which calls for a building authority, which is the key point, I would have thought, of the motion. If Fianna Fáil is not in favour of having supervision of the construction sector through a building authority, how is it in favour of it? It should be called to account for this because I heard the same guff about it being a terrible disincentive to getting the construction sector back on track if we start adding all these extra demands on them. Where did we hear this before? We heard it from Boris Johnson and David Cameron in the years preceding the likes of Grenfell when red tape had to be removed to help business carry on its merry way.

NAMA was involved with Beacon South Quarter and funded the completion of many of those apartments in Sandyford. Apparently the works were signed off by NAMA. Does the Minister of State not think the State has a liability here? I agree it should not be the State that steps in on these legacy issues, but a levy should be imposed on the construction sector to fund them. This is meant to be done for pyrite and should be done in this regard. NAMA has to be asked to account for why it was happy to sell them off and not do those proper checks.

See this speech in context