Catherine Ardagh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Today I would like to raise the Miami building collapse. I send my thoughts and prayers to the survivors, the families of survivors, the families of the victims, and the families of those missing. There are still 156 people missing. It is a tragedy of a huge scale, where a building collapsed during the middle of the night. There are terrifying, heart-breaking images of bunk beds hanging out of windows. It is completely unfathomable and deeply upsetting. We learned also that an engineers’ report was commissioned a few years previously. It outlined serious structural issues with the property. Nobody is saying that they were the cause, but the fact is that there were structural issues and repairs were needed to the property.

We need to look at properties in Ireland. There is a 2018 chartered surveyors' report that states that the majority of Irish apartment buildings do not have a large enough sinking fund. I am not saying that buildings are imminently going to collapse. However, as here, not enough money has been put aside for structural improvements to properties. Many of our apartment blocks were built in the 1990s. They are okay at the moment. We do not hear of a huge number of structural issues. However, anecdotally, we hear that residents of older apartment blocks are being asked to cough up either €20,000 or €30,000 per unit to fix roofs. We need to figure out what we can do. The Multi-Unit Developments Act 2011 stipulates that €200 per year must be set aside per unit towards a sinking fund. That is not enough. Those who owns a small house or apartment will know that €200 is not going to cover a lot. We also have to look at local property tax. Many apartment dwellers pay local property tax but do not get a lot back from it. The Government needs to review sinking funds and, perhaps, how local property tax could be inputted into developing sinking funds for properties. This is an issue that will come down the tracks very fast, as apartment blocks that were built in the 1990s get older.

We need to have a serious debate in this House about how we address sinking funds. At the moment, they are completely inadequate. As the chartered surveyors’ report states, more than 25% of sinking funds do not even reach it at all.