Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Given that the Minister of State said he is conscious that I raised legacy issues he spent more than two thirds of his reply speaking about the present rather than the past, which has become the stock response of the Government to avoid dealing with the real issues.

Nobody is asking the Minister of State to take on full liability for the cost of latent defects. Here is the problem: the State has already accepted liability for some, including Priory Hall, pyrite and mica block in Donegal, but has left other home owners to their own devices. What we are calling for is very straightforward. We want a redress scheme that provides a one-stop shop to assist homeowners to deal with latent defects when they find them. We also call for a mediation and dispute resolution service, not unlike the Residential Tenancies Board, to make the developer pay in the first instance. To take the one part of the Minister of State's reply relevant to my question, if we leave the home owner at the mercy of the legal system as it stands he or she will never get redress.

The Minister of State also knows there are cases where the developer is no longer pursuable and we need a fund to tackle this. In my view, a portion of this should come from industry and another portion should come from the State because the State has liability for the self-regulation that allowed this to happen. Under our proposals, the €40 million the State will lose on Priory Hall would have been €20 million because the industry would have been forced to pay its fair share. At some point, the Government must take its head out of the sand and provide some assistance - not full liability - for the hundreds if not thousands of home owners who, through no fault of their own, have ended up in properties with fire safety issues, water ingress issues or other structural problems that need to be addressed.

These people are asking for our help. A unanimous recommendation from the Oireachtas committee has given the Minister of State a pathway and he should get his head out of the sand.

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