Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister said he understood the problem. The next step is to try to resolve it. He said it cannot be done in a rushed fashion and he mentioned that it might take up to ten years. I do not think anyone I have talked to, and there are a number of affected residents in my constituency, including in Ballycullen, Citywest and Rathfarnham, can wait that long. They are terrified, afraid and extremely angry because there is common agreement that homeowners are not responsible for defects that are due to light-touch building control.

The really galling thing is that developers can walk away, liquidate their company, reinvent themselves and start trading across the road. There is something sick in a society that allows that. There is something wrong with corporate Ireland if that is the way we will allow things to continue to go on. That is what is happening at present. Many of these developers made significant sums of money during the Celtic tiger. Many of them liquidated themselves and, as I said, have reinvented themselves under the names of their sons or daughters, or even just changed the name or initial of their companies to reinvent themselves. The challenge for the owners is they are then left with that property.

Let us talk about the owners. Some of them downsized and moved to apartments believing that now that their mortgage was cleared they would be able to retire and get on with their lives. They are now faced with this huge worry. We need to do more to support them. It is not acceptable that developers can walk away. It is about 100% redress. It is about coming up with a scheme that works. It has to be fast and deliver for ordinary people. The common message we can all agree on is that we need to come up with ideas and we need ideas soon.

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