Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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276. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government if he will urgently engage with the Housing Agency on the need to pause all of its decisions to overturn the recommendations of engineers acting for homeowners, under the enhanced defective concrete block grant scheme, following confirmation from the National Standards Authority of Ireland that it intends to amend the standard I.S. 465 to make provision for internal sulphate attack (ISA) and testing to identify ISA, pyrrhotite alteration and other highly reactive forms of iron sulphide. [39022/24]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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I commenced the Remediation of Dwellings Damaged by the Use of Defective Concrete Blocks Act 2022 ('the 2022 Act') on 22 June 2023, which contains the enhanced grant scheme and adopted the related Regulations on 29 June 2023.

The 2022 Act sets out the role of the Housing Agency who act as agents on behalf of the local authorities under the terms of the Scheme. Once a home has met the damage threshold for entry to the scheme, the Housing Agency will engage its Framework Chartered Engineers to undertake the assessment, survey, sampling, testing and categorisation of the dwelling thereafter on a priority basis in accordance with the national standard I.S. 465:2018 and thereafter determine the appropriate remediation option and grant amount.

The Ministerial Guidelines for the scheme state the "The Housing Agency will, in their analysis and deliberations, take into consideration the presence of pyrrhotite" and the Housing Agency have confirmed this is the case.

Following the publication of any revised standard published by the NSAI, the DCB grant scheme will be reviewed at that point, in the event that such amendments are required.