Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am thankful for the opportunity to speak on this issue. I welcome the debate tonight. I wish the Minister and Minister of State good luck. They have a tough job in hand in their Department.

In Dublin especially, there was a major problem over the years with pyrite. Certain quarries on the outskirts of the city posed a problem. Some of the problems have been rectified but a test needs to be done on all new quarries that are open to make sure the material is suitable. Many families who bought houses got into serious trouble over pyrite.

A certain amount of regulation is required, and no one denies that, but there are simple steps that can be taken for anyone who comes from the building side of things. Bringing blockwork up to the hip of the roof of a building with 40 apartments would prevent a lot of problems. There are simple procedures.

People in Dublin are talking about the price of property but if there are people with 40 letters after their names dreaming up ideas, the price of houses will be put totally out of the reach of people. One must watch what one does with regulations, therefore. There is certain amount of regulation needed, and no one denies that.

Everyone sympathises with what happened in England. There are, however, simple things that can be done by anyone in the building sector to stop fire flying from one apartment to another. They need to be done. Timber is being used to construct walls, such that one can hear what a person is saying next door, and that will not work if we want to prevent fires from spreading. It is as simple as that. There is a 20-minute delay with regard to many of the fire boards and it should be ensured that there is testing.

Governments need to wake up to the fact that many of the small quarries are being put out of business. The pre-1963 measure of recent years was a hoax. We are looking at monopolies in quarries. Whether we like it or not, we need quarries. There could be pyrite in one quarry but we need to open quarries around the country. We have the so-called environmentalists objecting to that also, but we need to make sure this is sorted once and for all. We heard earlier that this has been a problem since the 1960s. No Government is going to click its fingers and solve this overnight. It will take a lot of money and time, and we need to start somewhere. We will need a big budget to do it. If one is building a house for oneself, one does it to the best of one's ability. I do not want to see geniuses coming from every council around the country when people are building one-off houses telling them what they have to and must not do, as was the case over the past year. If one is building one's own houses, one builds it to the best specifications.

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