Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will pick up from where Deputy Ó Broin finished. I absolutely agree that this is not about kicking it into next month, and certainly not next year because this issue is far too urgent for that. It is about getting it right and we believe that we can get it right. While I am not a member of the committee, I speak as someone who attends the Oireachtas Select Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage. The amendments the Labour Party will bring forward will be tabled in my name, and those in the Seanad will be in the name of my colleague Senator Rebecca Moynihan, the Labour Party housing spokesperson. This is about getting it right.

The families I speak to, including members of the Donegal diaspora who are resident and politically active in County Louth tell me that they want to get this right. I speak on a daily basis to the affected residents in Donegal. All the people I speak to frequently with my colleague, Councillor Martin Farren in Donegal, say that the residents of Donegal and Mayo, and the residents representing those affected in other counties including Clare, Limerick, Sligo and elsewhere, want to get this right and they have waited long enough. There is now an urgency about getting this done and getting it right. I certainly will provide my time to allow this to be done correctly and for adequate time to be given to consideration of important amendments.

To be fair, the Minister does not want to make any excessive claims in respect of 100% redress. The Labour Party wants to put on the record that it has always supported the campaigners' demands for 100% redress. I will feed back to the Minister his opening lines when he said: "The scheme that today’s legislation underpins is a dramatic leap forward towards a 100% grant scheme." While he did not make any excessive claims, he said that he believes "it goes a long way to address the fundamental concerns and needs of homeowners". Undoubtedly, it is a better scheme than those originally proposed. He has done some work with the campaigners, and we all have made proposals on how the schemes could be improved but it appears from correspondence that Members have received, and from the views expressed by different groups, that there is still some way to go.

Ireland is a very small country, and we all know somebody who knows somebody affected by this disaster. The Minister quite correctly pointed it out and described it as a disaster. That is exactly what it has been. The counties with the largest preponderance of mica-affected homes are Mayo and Donegal. We are aware that homes are affected in Clare, Limerick, Sligo and elsewhere. At the moment there is also a small number of homes that may be affected in County Louth, the precise extent of which has yet to be established. The Minister said the scheme may evolve in time and will have the capacity to include other counties if the need arises because the full extent of this is not fully known.

When it is concluded and it is improved, the scheme needs to be agile enough to be able to respond to issues as they arise. This crisis has touched people throughout the State. Even if one is not an affected homeowner, one's heart breaks for those who are affected. Building or buying a home is the biggest investment a person makes in his or her life. It is a place that one calls home and, as many have done, it may also be the place that one took pride in building oneself. A home may also be the place where people raise their kids. It may have been found to be dangerously unsafe, crumbling before the family's eyes, and parts of it may have already fallen away. It is a daily nightmare, and the stress and the insecurity must, frankly, be unimaginable.

Today is not the day for history lessons. It is a day for looking forward and doing our best for the people we all seek to represent. It is about getting on with the job for the people who desperately need our help but it is about getting it right too. There is still, however, a noisy bunch of ideologues and ideologically-driven commentators, who believe there should be less regulation of business and industry, fewer standards and less enforcement. They say: "Let us get rid of the red tape and all of that nonsense." I put it to them that they should sit down with the affected families in Inishowen, or anywhere else in the State, who have been affected and who are now paying the price for poor regulation and the absence of laws and enforcement. This is not an abstract issue. If a person believes that because they are not living in mica-affected home and it does not affect them, then he or she is thinking incorrectly. We all pay in the end for a lack of regulation. The taxpayers and citizens across the country need to know that the bill for a lack of regulation or poor enforcement, be it in construction or in the banks, always falls on them.

It is not just about mica; there is a pattern. For example, we have seen thousands of lives fall apart due to structural defaults and fire defects in apartments. This is another legacy of the Wild West era of "Whatever you're having yourself, sure it'll be grand." As with many other Members in this House, I have worked closely with the Construction Defects Alliance. I do not wish in any way to confuse the two issues, but we do need to see action in budget 2023 with practical supports given to the owners of between 60,000 and 100,000 affected apartments who are covered by the Construction Defects Alliance campaign. The longer this goes on unresolved and the longer that people put off doing the remediation work that needs to be done to make these homes safer, the more unsafe they will be and the more uncertainty prevails. It would be useful if the Minister in his closing remarks, if he feels it is appropriate in the context of the debate will tell us what we can expect to see with regard to the Construction Defects Alliance campaign in the budget in the autumn.

There is an onus on the Oireachtas to atone for the grievous mistakes of the recent past and to put our words into real action. The Bill and the scheme will need to be right this time for all affected homeowners, now and into the future. I discussed this with my Labour Party comrade, Councillor Martin Farren in County Donegal, earlier today. he pointed out some issues with the Bill and the scheme as it is currently presented, and some amendments that could be made to improve the operation of the scheme. There are many amendments that we will all table for discussion next week and we need time to be able to do that. First and foremost, we need to get this right and when we do, we need to move on this as soon as possible, especially for owner-occupiers. They need to be at the front of our minds. As Deputy Ó Broin correctly articulated, there is an absence of trust and a lack of confidence in the process, which is understandable, given the experience of families and campaign groups to date. Those families need certainty and people need to be confident that the State will not just support them to the end but listen to the genuine concerns at the moment. Currently, there is a lack of confidence arising from the direct experience.

As I said earlier, while I am not a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage, I take an interest in the conduct of the affairs of the committee. I am aware of the concerns of the joint committee members that have been expressed, which were articulated by Deputy Ó Broin earlier. It is important that these concerns are understood and appreciated by the Minister and his officials because I believe these will form the bulk of many of the amendments we expect to deal with next week. Under head 14, for example, it must be the case that updated SCSI reports on costs should be obtained with regard to the inflation factor. We simply do not know where construction inflation will settle. Under head 15, the issue of foundations simply must also be addressed, and they have to be included. On the matter of whether there might be unsafe levels of mica in the foundations, it is surely as plain as the nose on one's face that this must be established before any work commences. It must be covered by the scheme in its entirety. It is not too much to ask that heads could be put together to have a robust testing and certification scheme in place before any remediation work, which could cost up to €400,000, would commence. Under head 21, it should be self-evident that any appeals process would be independent of all the statutory actors. That makes sense. Natural justice insists that this would be the case, and public confidence demands it.

I am also attracted to the argument from a Mayo mica campaigner that a homeowner may be prepared to downsize to rebuild a smaller home within the full amount of the mica redress grant rather than having to build the exact same larger and costlier home. This proposal has merit and should be permitted, with the necessary checks and balances put in place. This makes environmental sense too with regard to the life cycle and it makes sense on every level that people should be permitted to downsize where it is appropriate, with checks and balances in place. There should be no downsizing penalty.

Some consideration could also be given to a fair grant scheme to allow for an award to be paid retrospectively where a homeowner may have had to carry our remediation work well in advance of the prospect of any remediation scheme being put in place.

It is reasonable and fair to request such an approach. There are genuinely grave concerns on the grant amounts for house size. As it stands, it seems that many of the affected families and homeowners may not be able to avail of the scheme to remediate their home and this as to be addressed in the end. Likewise, there are legitimate concerns that the cost of rebuilding mica homes under the proposed scheme would leave many homeowners tens of thousands of euro out of pocket.

These arguments have been made in good faith by the people who presented to the committee and who have been in contact with all of us as Deputies and they should not be misconstrued as an attempt to unduly benefit from the scheme as some, though not the Minister, may have put it. The Government report undertaken by the SCSI did note these concerns, yet one witness at the committee noted that we still have some affected homeowners, victims who have had their lives put on hold, being treated as “chancers” when making claims. That sort of experience should be informative for us. The committee also heard the case of Martina Hegarty from Mayo, as Deputy Ó Broin alluded to. Although hers is one of the smallest houses eligible under the scheme, she said she will still be left with a minimum of €50,000 shortfall under the proposed framework.

Residents in County Donegal tell us all the time that they want to get this right but they want to make sure that owner-occupiers are prioritised. These are people who are paying their mortgages, who live there and have no other interests anywhere else; that is their family home. Some, not all, have a sense that they are being held to ransom by others who may be investors in properties in the county looking for the best possible deal. That is something I have picked up on but I am not saying that is the general view. It is understandable that owner-occupiers want the right scheme in place as soon as possible, so they can proceed and they should not be held back by what they might describe as ephemeral concerns that are being expressed under the radar by others. The Minister may be aware of those concerns but I want to put that on the record because the ordinary homeowner is the priority here. To be fair, the landlord who is on the RTB register, who is doing things legitimately and where someone is living in that house, should also be prioritised. That is why the scheme needs to be up and running as soon as possible with owner-occupiers prioritised.

The Minister set out the financial cost to the State of the scheme His analysis is that it would cost approximately €2.7 billion, which is not an insignificant amount by any stretch of the imagination. The State has no choice other than to step in and address the issues in this Republic for taxpayers and for citizens because of the absence of regulation under the watch of the Oireachtas over recent times. This is not a long history; it happened in the recent past. Recently, I outlined how a reformed bank levy could assist in providing the resources that we need to address the cost demands in the context of this scheme and other schemes that may arise. Deputy Ó Broin mentioned accountability and holding those who are ultimately responsible for this to account. We need to hear more about that. Legal proceedings are being launched by some of the affected homeowners against those they deem responsible for this disaster. Some form of assistance should be provided to them by the State. The NSAI, and county councils may well be joined in those actions. Ultimately, they are agencies of the State and they are accountable and responsible, and in the case of State agencies, they are responsible to the Minister who, in turn, is responsible to the House.

We need to make sure that this never happens again. That is why this House needs to make a determined effort and the Government needs to learn from this and ensure that regulation is key and regulation and enforcement is implemented properly and to the standard that would be expected in a developed wealthy Republic.

Let us take the builders' register. Industry interests are essentially policing themselves again. Do we ever learn? If we cannot learn from the mica scandal, something that has come at huge expense to many thousands of families across the country, not only financially but also emotionally, psychologically and materially, then when will we ever learn? I cannot say that these mistakes or issues will never arise again. Legislation is going through these Houses and there is a proposal that will soon find its way into law where we will have a builders' register that will effectively still be regulated by the representative body for builders in this country. That is bizarre and does not stand up to scrutiny. The Minister knows my view on this and that of many Opposition Members. That is not a sustainable position.

The suppliers of defective blocks must be held to account. What committee members heard last week regarding the operation of quarries needs to be investigated and properly interrogated. Higher standards need to be put at the centre of our approach to this in the future. Lessons must be learned.

I appeal to the Minister again to work with us to give more time to take amendments next week and, indeed, the week after. I have said many times in the House and in the media that such is the challenge around the cost of living that we cannot wait until October, or it seems now late September, for a budget we need it now. Myself and my Labour Party colleagues are prepared for the House to sit longer. I cannot speak for other Members of the Opposition but I know that we are all determined to get this right. We are prepared to sit ain committee and I know the Seanad would also be prepared to sit longer if it meant getting this right and concluding this difficult journey in the right way. We all know what we need to do and the Minister needs to enable us to get there.

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