Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 2:

To insert the following after "and that industry contributes to the overall cost of remediating defective properties": "— the Government must launch a full public investigation into how defective material was sold into the housing market in such quantity and for so long, and that those responsible are held to account.".

Tá mé buíoch as an rún seo atá os ár gcomhair inniu. I pay respect to the people of Donegal and Mayo who have come up to Dublin in their thousands today. It is a big thing for people to take a full day off work and travel hundreds of miles from their home towns to Dublin, spend the whole day here and head back. I know this because I have been involved in various campaigns on hospitals. It takes a massive amount of dedication. The campaign has done an awful lot of work to make sure today has happened and I pay respect to it. I understand why the frustration is there because people have been battling for years for justice with regard to their homes.

Families' lives have been absolutely destroyed in Donegal.

It is incredible. When you speak to the families, as I have done, the level of damage done to their lives is enormous. Their life savings and everything they have in relation to their families is falling down around them. Many of them have no options for the future.

Also, we see that the local authorities will be hammered because the local authorities have some of these buildings. Public houses, public buildings, farmyards and factories etc., are all likely to be affected here. One of the big issues of this crisis is that its scale is still fairly unknown and people are only starting to find out that their buildings are defective. The reason in part that the scale of the crisis is unknown is because families had to pay thousands of euro to get a survey done of their house to be able to apply for the current redress scheme. I have spoken to many families who simply are trying their best to ignore the cracks in their walls because they cannot afford even to participate in the application process for this scheme. We in Aontú will be calling for the Government to make sure that families can survey their homes without significant financial cost to them.

In my view, there are two reasons why this happened. The first is because of light-touch regulation. Light-touch regulation is a legacy of decades of Fianna Fáil Government. It has cost these families in Donegal everything that they have but it has also cost the citizens of this country billions for everything from the banks to insurance companies etc. Light-touch regulation or self-certification is no certification. It is not worth the paper that it is written on and the fact that Fianna Fáil allowed this to happen over decades was, in my view, in order that many of its cronies could get rich while doing so. That is what happened from insurance companies to banks and to construction companies. They facilitated a system where this happened and the country is paying for it now.

This is also happening, in my view, because of the fact that we are a Dublin-centric State, we are a lob-sided country and we are becoming a city state. I heard another Deputy state that this is not Dublin against the country. It is not the people of Dublin against the country but it is the political establishment based in Dublin which does not give a tuppenny damn, typically, with regards counties such as Donegal, Mayo and Clare. People say that the people of Donegal are different and that is because they are treated differently by this political establishment. No doubt if it was south Dublin rather than Donegal, it would be 100% redress right away.

It is frustrating to me and many people that one of the suppliers of these blocks is still a supplier to Donegal County Council. If someone paints your house and does a terrible job of it, you do not keep employing them in the future to work on your house. There is no reason a company should abide by the rules or proper functioning if it is guaranteed to have future business. We are calling for 100% redress. It has to be the only solution.

We in Aontú have also submitted an amendment to the Sinn Féin motion. We want there to be a proper full public investigation into what happened with regards mica. If there is no investigation, nobody is held responsible. If there is no accountability, there is no change. There has to be a public investigation. I would urge all the political parties and the Government to support the Aontú amendment that there would be an independent public investigation into the crisis in Donegal. If there is not, I guarantee it will happen over and over again.

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