Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to talk to the Minister of State but the issue of defective concrete blocks, not just in my home county of Donegal but in the west of Ireland. As he knows, the National Standards Authority of Ireland is tasked with coming up with a standard we can trust. Why is this a crucial issue now?

When we go to hospital and we have a cancer diagnosis, we trust the diagnosis and the prognosis is trusted to try to heal ourselves and get back to a place we want to be. However, we have a diagnosis however called IS 465, which is the standard that nobody trusts or stands over. We cannot, therefore, trust the prognosis. We cannot trust the remediation which the Government is asking the person to take. People are being asked to take down just the outer leaf of their houses when the whole house probably has to be demolished and rebuilt again. We have an issue that does not just affect people who are living in defective block homes but the entire housing market across most of Donegal. In my county, or example, in a very profound way, people cannot buy or sell a house without ensuring that they do not have defective concrete blocks. Lots of houses, however, are being misdiagnosed. These are houses that are actually perfectly fine, which could be sold and which people could purchase in a housing crisis and they cannot be because we have a standard we cannot trust.

The NSAI has again delayed again and again and everything is in a state of flux in the county. Our housing market is a perfect storm. We have the same crisis across all of Ireland but we now have this defective block crisis in the middle of it all. I am asking that collectively we urge a sense of emergency and urge the NSAI to publish its draft amendments to the standard soon. It would then go to public consultation and this could drag on and on. We do not have another six months or a year, for sure. I am asking that the Minister of State invests a sense of urgency in tackling and dealing with this and for him to understand that this standard IS 465 is a disaster, people do not trust it and we need a new one we can trust based on authoritative science this time, not a desktop study.

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