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

Across the State, tens of thousands of homeowners, private and social housing tenants, are living in defective buildings with defective blocks and pyrite in the foundations but also many with fire safety, water ingress and other structural defects. All those people are waiting very anxiously on next week's budget announcements to see what, if anything, the Government has in store for them. Sinn Féin will continue to make the case for the need for substantial amendment to the defective block remediation legislation as well as a significant increase in funding for those homeowners. However, what I want to talk about here is the working group on defective housing.

Only last week, myself and my colleague, Deputy Ó Snodaigh, met a very large number of residents in a residential development in Park West in Deputy Ó Snodaigh's constituency and on the boundary of mine. They are apartment owners, the overwhelming majority of whom bought homes in good faith, who are now facing bills individually of €60,000 to €70,000 each to remediate that property. Those people, like tens of thousands of others across the State, definitely need a remediation scheme and it needs to have significant funding in addition to whatever funding is provided for pyrite and defective block schemes. That scheme also needs to be retrospective for those homeowners who, whether under pressure from insurers or fire safety officials, have had to remediate their properties or parts of their properties to date. There will also be a need for some sort of interim measures for those who need to urgently need to remediate their properties now.

Sinn Féin's strong view is that the best way to do this is to take the pyrite resolution board that is currently in place and expand its terms of reference so that homeowners affected by Celtic tiger-era defects, which they did not cause, can immediately apply to that body. It is almost finished its work in terms of pyrite. The Government estimates that there are a few hundred homeowners left. That way, rather than setting up a new grant scheme and having to go through the whole process again, we would take the structure that is there and give it additional funding. Crucially, the advantage of doing that would be that it would not be a grant scheme like we have in Donegal and Mayo and now Clare and Limerick. Those schemes are not fit for purpose. Given the complex nature of multi-unit residential developments and the fact that they are not individual owners with an individual discrete unit but an owners' management company with collective ownership of the shared areas, an end-to-end scheme managed by the Pyrite Resolution Board, albeit probably renamed, would be an eminently sensible way to do that as well as reducing the costs ultimately to the Exchequer as well.

I am keen to hear from the Minister of State. I know he will not tell me what is in the budget - I am not asking why he cannot answer that particular question as somebody else can do that - but I ask that he would at least give us some sense of what has happened since the working group's report was given to the Government in the summer of this year. What is the Government's thinking on how to deal with this?

I can attest - Deputy Ó Snodaigh would say the same - to what I heard from the homeowners we met last week. I meet homeowners like these from throughout the country, from counties Clare, Donegal and Mayo as well as from across Dublin and the commuter belt counties. In some cases, they have been waiting for 15 years to get some indication of whether there will be any scheme at all. They did not create these defects. They bought homes in good faith. While they share the view of many of us that in the first instance the developer responsible should foot the bill, for many reasons in many cases it is not possible to pursue the developer. The Statute of Limitations may have been exceeded. The developer may no longer be trading or has created a new designated activity company, trading under another name.

I ask the Minister of State to outline where the Government is at. Can we expect some form of scheme to be in place from 2023 to give these homeowners the much-needed respite they rightly deserve and desperately need?

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