Conor Sheehan (Limerick City, Labour)

This amending Bill is a tweak to a scheme that does not work. The scheme does not work because it is not an end-to-end redress scheme like the pyrite scheme that people on the east coast of the country have been able to avail of quite successfully for a number of years now. Recently, myself and Senator Nessa Cosgrove visited Donegal. We went to Letterkenny and met with Deputy Charles Ward and some of his councillors. We saw the scale of the human devastation. I will never forget the people I met or the smell in some of their homes of sheer damp. I will never forget people telling me they are terrified of the roof falling down on their house because the walls are crumbling and cannot hold up the roof. What is being proposed here is an improvement on the original scheme but it is nowhere near enough. People right down the west coast as far as Limerick bought and paid for their homes. They scrimped and saved and worked as hard as they could. Now in many cases they effectively have to pay twice for those homes.

It is very disrespectful to publish the Bill only a few short hours before the debate. I know the housing committee waived pre-legislative scrutiny on this weeks ago to ensure that it could be done as soon as possible. When we are talking about the specifics, what is being proposed in respect of semi-detached dwellings does not go anywhere near far enough. I have seen ludicrous situations, including one in my own constituency of Limerick, where one home from a pair of semi-detached houses was demolished as defective while the other was left standing with very obvious defects and obvious damage done to it during the process. Particularly in respect of Limerick, we are at the tip of the iceberg. There are many people in Limerick who do not even know they are living in defective homes. There is a need to consider this scheme on a national and not a county-by-county basis. This is yet another sticking plaster over a gaping wound. People have been campaigning for 15 years for redress for their defective homes. Seven years after the Government first came forward with the fundamentals of a scheme in 2018, only a couple of hundred homes have been fixed. The scheme has not worked because it has been designed as a grant scheme and not as an end-to-end scheme.

The Minister is making the same mistake, unfortunately, in relation to the legislation around defective apartments. These poor traumatised people are expected, essentially, to project-manage an entire process themselves with little help or little assistance. Even the cost of getting an initial assessment - the testing and the reports - quickly runs to thousands of euro. My concern is that in trying to address this crisis, the Minister is not actually addressing it in the whole as the humanitarian disaster it is. He is sort of going around the place firefighting. The Minister's visit to County Donegal earlier this year was very welcome because his predecessor refused to do so, but what the Minister is proposing here is not enough because the scheme by its very premise is flawed.

We finally have the so-called emergency legislation to lift the cap, which was promised over a year ago, but we need to see the scientific underpinning of the scheme updated. Pyrrhotite and framboidal pyrite are the cause of concrete cracking and crumbling. The review into IS 465 needs to be published and that is not due until quarter 1 of 2026. The scientific underpinning of the scheme is outdated and flawed because it assesses superficial damage and not structural stability. We need an interim measure to stop people continuing to get wrong remediation measures. For example, options 2 to 5 under this scheme essentially involve leaving defective concrete somewhere within a building. The Government is going to have to come back to that in years to come, and that is going to cost the State and the taxpayer more money. People have huge difficulties in insuring and mortgaging these properties. This is not a long-term solution, and these homes will continue to deteriorate. Option 1, full demolition and reconstruction, is the only viable option. It should not be up to homeowners to determine whether they should replace their foundations. That is why we need an end-to-end scheme. At the bare minimum, we need to make sure we test the foundations on every single home on this scheme.

I welcome the fact that parts of Fingal will be included in the revised scheme because my colleague, Deputy Robert O'Donoghue, has been campaigning and working with affected families for years. The request first went in from Fingal County Council to the Housing Agency in September 2023. The testing was done in December 2023. It really should not take this long because if we factor in the impact of the concrete block levy and the increased cost of construction, hardworking families are effectively being doubly penalised. The issue is that this is actually not fundamentally 100% redress. For example, there are issues with people downsizing. They will only be paid for the square metres they rebuild, irrespective of what is actually left on their mortgage.

Before I conclude this evening, I want to emphasise that not one single quarry has been adequately held to account for the defective products they sold. Many of these queries are still selling defective concrete blocks. Government inspectors, not quarry owners or employees, must select material for inspection because otherwise we have no real way of preventing this. We need an end-to-end scheme. We essentially need mark 2 of the pyrite remediation scheme that gives people the ideal model to allow them to rebuild their lives. Along with my colleagues across the Opposition, I will be proposing some amendments to this Bill because I especially think, going back to what other speakers said earlier, that the arbitrary deadline of 29 March needs to be looked at again.

There is nothing in it on expenses incurred in 2023. I urge the Minister to look at this again. While I welcome the fact he is tweaking the scheme, I do not accept fundamentally that the scheme is fit for purpose. It is designed as a grant scheme when it should be an end-to end scheme. Unfortunately the Government is insistent on doing the same thing with the defective apartments.

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