Jen Cummins (Dublin South Central, Social Democrats)

I am happy measures are being put in place and the scheme is coming onstream. However, for these people who are living there, the time is now. How much time does the Government need? When can they access this? The difficulty is the communal areas. If people are not paying in and if everyone is not in the OMC, what seems to be happening is that they are not able to access the remedial fund. When that happens, those areas are not being looked after because there is no one able to do it. What happens then for apartment blocks where the OMC is not as strong as it could be? How will it be supported?

I am concerned about the Minister of State's comment that the Government needs to make sure it is value for taxpayers. These people are taxpayers. I will not outline the total, but one woman has paid in a lot of money to make sure that her home is safe for her children, herself and her husband. The reality is that when these apartments were built, building standards were not upheld. This is a problem of a regulation that was never enforced. We have a number of apartment blocks not only in my constituency but around the country, which now have to be sorted out because there was no enforcement. I do not know how this happened. We are supposed to have regulations for everything, and it seems to not have worked. We have fire regulations, but this water ingress is also happening. The people who live there are taxpayers. They are renters or they own their apartments, and they deserve better. I acknowledge the need for value for money, but there is no value for money for the people who live there. They are seriously stressed. I thank the Minister of State for his response. I will keep pressing on this issue because time is of the essence. People spend a lot of time in their homes. This is totally fixable. If homes are dangerous and if they are stressed in their homes, time is of the essence.

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