Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have huge respect for the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, so what I am going to say is not directed at him personally. More than 100,000 people in this country own apartments that have defects. A question on how that will be addressed deserved to be answered by the senior Minister in the Department who has control of the timeline here. I am somewhat disappointed that he is not here to answer it. I have nothing against the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, who is a very fine worker and a great colleague.

Two weeks ago, the Friday before the bank holiday weekend, my phone lit up. Another set of apartment owners in Dublin South-Central received notification that they could no longer use their underground car park. They were told the waste disposal areas were being moved outside of the complex because a fire officer's enforcement notice had been given to them with a prosecution to follow due to the fact there are fire defects and it was a high risk apartment complex.That night, people sat around in groups, very distressed, wondering if they were safe putting their children to bed that night in their apartments. If one could not park a car down below, how was it safe to put one's child into an apartment? They do not have any choices. They cannot sell because they can only dispose of the apartment is a cash buyer. They cannot move anywhere else because there is nowhere else to go. This is merely one complex of apartments among 17,000 thousand apartments that are in Dublin South-Central that I am told are affected by this.

I appreciate that we have had a working group and that it produced a fine, thorough and extensive report. It was an excellent piece of work. I appreciate that in September the Minister brought an information memorandum to Cabinet stating that another group was sitting to decide on how there would be redress. It will report before Christmas and apparently options will be brought to Cabinet. I am sure the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, will confirm that today. That will involve legislation which means we will be into March or April before there is any redress. Meanwhile there are real-time consequences to this. There are people suffering mental health issues as a consequence. Relationships are breaking down. There are people who cannot meet the bills. If there was a disaster in one of those complexes tonight due to a fire, we would have an awful lot of wringing of hands by the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and Ministers and we would have action on it the next day but that is not good enough. These families live in risk of the substandard provisions that were put in at the height of the Celtic tiger when there was loose enforcement of regulations. They are in the main suffering the consequences. It is not their fault. Any delay on this is insufferable and intolerable. To be perfectly honest, they need an answer and they need it now.

I appreciate the State grinds slowly but this is not new. This goes back to 2017. December 2017 was when the first report was published by a joint Oireachtas committee on housing - I sit on the Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage now - which the Minister sat on as a spokesperson for the Opposition. That report showed the lack of safety within these apartments. It is not okay that there is the slightest delay.

After that Friday night, at approximately 6 o'clock the following morning, I sent out text messages and followed-up with telephone calls to the Department, to the Minister and to the Tánaiste. All of them came back with reassurances, but that is no use if one is sitting in an apartment facing into Christmas - maybe one is a tech employee or something like that - and is looking at a bill for €68,000. That is not an answer. We need an answer now.