Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish to share time with Deputy Boyd Barrett.

I welcome everybody into the Gallery. It is not our Gallery; it is theirs. It is always good to see the public come in to the Parliament because it has that dynamic of putting manners on lots of people in here. They are very welcome.

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling the motion prior to the end of the year because it is hugely important that we discuss this. I doubt it will be our last discussion on the matter.

On the previous occasion we had a discussion on this, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, was sitting where the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage is and he replied to Deputy Paul Murphy, who has been working closely with representatives of the Not Our Fault campaign who are in the Gallery, that no matter what the Government does, it will not be good enough for People Before Profit, and that we will not accept anything. We and the campaigners will accept 100% redress. That is what they will accept and People Before Profit will be happy when they see that delivered. Tonight, the Minister should at least give a commitment to the people in the Gallery that they will be treated no differently from the other groups that have been failed by the State - the mica groups and the pyrite groups - which had to campaign to get justice.

It is about the State's failure. I will not take lectures from other Deputies about point scoring. It is important to talk about the truth of what happened here. The "RTÉ Investigates" programme did a lot to bring it out. When we talk about estates failure, it is not an oversight. It is not a lapse, a blunder or somebody forgetting to look at something. It was a deliberate policy of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to treat builders and developers with kid gloves, allow them to self-regulate and, therefore, put these people into this position. Those parties do not stop there. They have rezoned lands for them and they have more or less married the developer and the building industry in a way that is shocking and unbelievable. We must move away from that legacy. The Minister's commitment tonight to these people that he will give them 100% redress, he will work out a formula, it will be legislated for, etc., would be a fantastic Christmas gift or Christmas payback to people who deserve it. It is no exaggeration to say that the housing crisis and the defective apartment crisis both have their roots in the same problem, that is, the closeness of the political establishment to the developer-led and builder-led model, and we should start by recognising 100% redress is what is needed.

I want to address some other issues around the report itself. We welcome most elements of the report, particularly regarding the scale of the revelations as to the number of homes involved. However, it is quite clear to anyone who watched the "RTÉ Investigates" special that the builders and developers knew exactly how to build apartments. It was in their plans and those plans were signed off by local authorities and professionals. They did not build them in the way they were meant to build them, not because of complexities of buildings but because it was cheaper and they could make more profits by taking shortcuts. To suggest otherwise is misleading and an attempt to obscure who is responsible and why they are responsible.

The infuriating omission from the report is the refusal and the discouragement of any attempt to seek out who is responsible for the massive number of defective apartments. The report only states that many developments were done by special purpose vehicles or that developers-builders may have gone out of business. This is speculative and not based on any attempt by the report and its authors to find out who was behind the defective apartments and whether many of them are still operating. There are people in the Gallery to whom I have spoken who face a €65,000 plus bill to remediate their homes that are dangerous to live in and they can look out their window across a field from the apartment and see the developer who built their home building another complex today. They know who it is. It would not take rocket science on the part of the State to find out exactly who it is and to go after them. They have not disappeared into the ether. They have not been teleported to another dimension. They are still very much involved in the trade and working in the industry. Most importantly, they knowingly put the lives of 100,000 people, or a big chunk of them, at risk by not living up to the standards, particularly around fire protection. Cutting costs to maximise profits was what they were all about.

It might be worth our while looking across the water to what happened in Britain post Grenfell where a tax was placed on the profits of the residential development industry. We need to look at a long-term tax on the industry's profits that is designed in a way that they cannot pass on the cost and that there is no escaping from it. In the meantime, it behoves the Minister to say that the State will own up to its failures and give the reassurance and the 100% redress required by these people because of the culture that exists. We have a culture that led us this week to Liberty Lane where 27 young students lived in danger because a builder thought it was okay to break the law and create a defective apartment block for them that he was charging €500 to €700 a month for, and that was totally illegal. All those students face eviction on Friday because it is not safe to live in those apartments. The fire officer is extraordinarily worried about them. The builder has walked away with approximately €16,000 a month of their money. I believe they are owed that money back. The State needs to do much more to recreate a culture where builders and developers are held accountable and where there are consequences for them when they put lives and livelihoods at risk.

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