2025-12-10

I move amendment No. 1: In page 5, line 22, to delete “Blocks”. I will make the speech I was not allowed to make earlier and I will not be muzzled. I will talk about defective concrete. Today's Bill should have been an opportunity to correct the fundamentally broken system. Instead, we are laying more complexity on top of injustice and calling it progress. I have submitted 18 pages of amendments to improve this scheme, yet more than half of those amendments were ruled out of order, including my amendment regarding the March cut-off date that I had chosen. With that, the Government is leaving 43 homeowners behind because it has chosen to abandon them. My amendment would provide interim arrangements regarding the provision of IS 465, with scientific evidence reinstating the original engineers' determinations. Families, the purpose of modular homes, which is ultimately to save the State money, and ancillary payments were included. Partial defective builds before the cut-off date are still defective builds. Homeowners have been left behind. They have built their homes but their homes have crumbled and now they are left in debt through no fault of their own, but through the Government’s failure in regulation. The provision of upfront payments to allow people without necessary money to access the scheme, again at no cost to the State, was refused. My amendment to establish a public inquiry into the regulatory failures of this multibillion euro scheme was denied again, as well as many other extremities and amendments. The Government's amendments reveal the real problem we have, that is, we have not learned a single thing from the defective concrete crisis. Damage does not always look like damage. Legislation could have prevented this, but with flawed understanding, the deterioration will continue and the scheme will be flawed. There is one positive thing. A semi-detached house is now treated as one unit, so if one house does not meet the damage threshold, then the other can be deemed so. However, this is nothing more than a get-out-of-jail card as far as I am concerned. It relies on visual assessment. This is a blunt instrument that applies to all homes. The threshold does not measure structural integrity. The threshold measures visible cracking. Walls, however, are disintegrating behind plaster. You can knock the plaster and get nothing but dust. Walls are there to protect families, but in defective concrete homes, they do not protect families. They will end up killing families if we do not do something about it. Homes may not meet the threshold today but they will meet a catastrophic threshold in the years to come. The Minister provides no mechanism to allow us to move on, as far as I am concerned. Adjacent remediation is welcome in principle but the Bill restricts it to dwelling adaptation. Basically, if a person with a disability has to move on, that is okay as long as the disability is visible. This excludes children and adults with hidden disabilities, including autism, ADHD, chronic illness and mental health conditions. Under the Disability Act, these individuals are entitled to protection and accommodation but they are not getting it. They are not getting the same treatment as everybody else. I feel they are being discriminated against and I think everybody else will feel this, too, by the time I am finished. Allowing homeowners to remain on site with space on their sites would save the Exchequer money. It would allow people with a disabled child, for example, to move from one house into a new build that is kitted out for them. They can move into their build and it is at no cost to the State. We do not need to put pressure on the rental market because we have 25,000-plus homes affected in Donegal. If we were to move the people in 2,000 homes tomorrow, we would not be able to do it because we do not have the capacity. The Government will not look at modular homes but it must. If the Minister wants to do this properly, he needs to listen to the people on the ground and to the people who have done this and who have been fighting for them instead of following what the rest of the Government is saying to him. I am telling the Minister now that if he does not look at this in the correct manner, then what will follow will be a humanitarian disaster all over Ireland. It is already a humanitarian disaster in Donegal. Families with hidden disabilities and children with special needs endure overcrowding or sensory overload when they move to different accommodation. Can the Minister imagine if a child with autism, who has a certain way of living his or her life and perhaps has ADHD, is taken out of his or her home? A unit could have been built in another part of the garden. Leave them in their home and then let them move. As it is, that is not happening. We are having to move children to smaller places, with sensory overload, and even if they ever do recover, it will take them years. That is what we are here for. We are here to make sure that our citizens are treated equally but it is not happening. The proposed section 32 on transitional provisions are welcome because they ensure previous applications are not invalidated, but they do not address the symptomatic delays. The proposed Part 3, which amends the Building Control Act 1990, links defective concrete remediation to the national building standards. This is necessary for safety but we need to come in ahead. Voting down my amendment is voting against the people whom I represent. The people of Donegal have sent me up here. I was an ordinary working man who paid for his house. Tens of thousands of my people in Donegal, and people in Limerick, Clare and Mayo, are stuck. In the Minister's own constituency, they are stuck. It is going to be an epidemic if we do not do something about it. We have the opportunity to do it but if we do not do it, then we are going to abandon people and lives. It is bad enough that people in Donegal are treated like second class citizens, but for that to continue with their homes is unacceptable. I had a script for this speech but I am not going to stick to it. I am going to tell the Minister now that this has been going on 14 years. For 14 years, we have had failed housing Minister after failed housing Minister. It is about time that the Government took this seriously. What is happening in Donegal is also happening in Mayo, Limerick, Clare and Wexford. It is everywhere. It is happening in Kerry, Cork, you name it. There is a map out there and the only place it is not happening in is Antrim, but I am expecting a phone call any day. They know when they phone me that I will be there. I am always there and I always will be there. That is what I am saying.

I thank the Deputy. Are there any further offerings on the amendment? No. I call the Minister.

I thank the Deputy. I will respond to amendment No. 1, which proposes to amend the Short Title of the Bill. This amendment would render the Short Title of the Bill incomplete and imply that the Bill relates to other concrete products, not just defective concrete blocks. As the Deputy is aware, the function of the Bill is to amend sections of the principal Act that provide financial assistance to homeowners that have homes damaged by the use of defective concrete blocks. In those circumstances, I therefore cannot accept the amendment.

I will respond to the Minister. It is clear that the Minister does not actually understand the significance of the amendment that has been tabled by Deputy Ward. The problem is that deleterious materials in concrete are not confined solely to concrete blocks. They are in poured concrete and other materials. One of the fundamental weaknesses of the original regulations and the former Minister, Darragh O'Brien's 2022 scheme is that they confine the issue of deleterious materials to block only. I know the Minister is not going to accept the amendment. Hopefully, when the review of IS 465 is resolved, he will eventually realise that one of the many limitations - we will talk about those at great length throughout the course of the next four hours - of the scheme he is seeking to amend is that it is blind to instances where the deleterious material is in building materials other than block. This amendment, therefore, does not render the Short Title incomplete. It actually rectifies, albeit in the Title as opposed to the substance of the Bill, a significant limitation in the original scheme. This is going to have to change at some point. Obviously, it will not be now but it will change at some point.

I support Deputy Ward in the points he made. The number of amendments that were ruled out of order, particularly in relation to the public inquiry, is disappointing. There is much that we need to learn from what has happened and from what is going on. There is a real lack of accountability in the whole response that we have seen so far. It is very interesting. The Oireachtas Library and Research Service produced a briefing paper on the Bill. It is quite shocking to look at the tiny number of actual applications that were processed by the Housing Agency. There were over 2,500 applications but fewer than 1,000 were gone through. How many years is it now? We are 14 years in. When are we actually going to seriously address this? My concern is that, given what has been put forward, we will see more problems and the scheme not developed properly. I continue to be very concerned about it.

I will follow on from Deputies Ward and Ó Broin as regards where the regulation is based on block. As I said earlier, I have been a building contractor all my life. The same grit goes into block as goes into lintels, only it is a different sized chip. Lintels were 8 in. by 4 in., but now they are a regulated 8 in. by 8 in. even though it is the same material. It is just certified differently. It just uses a different sized chip, but it is the same stone. What goes into foundations also goes into the subfloor, the finished floor and the block work. It is the same stone. About the particles, the Minister might say that it covers the block only, but it is like baking a cake, using flour in one cake and saying that it is only down to that particular flour in that particular cake. It is the same flour. For every building material that may be used in a house, it is the same stone. The only thing that is different is the plastering, which is a sandstone. That is the difference. Everything else would be based off the different types of stone that are in the quarries. What I am trying to say to the Minister is that the amendment before the House seeks to remove "Blocks" only. If we were to interpret it through any law in the country, if a stone is a 6 mm chip, a 10 mm chip or a 20 mm chip, it is the same stone. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. It is simple science. Why not listen to people who understand what they are talking about? These hands are rough enough from using it for many years. I understand it. I am asking Members to understand the same. It cannot be put down just as one product. It has to be put down within the products of the house that have been used.

As Deputy O'Donoghue was saying about building, I have built for years and years, including in Inishowen, the most affected area, in the Finn Valley and in all these areas. However, I have also poured concrete into the streets. As Deputy O'Donoghue was saying, aggregate stone is a little bit different but the same infected stone is used. We have it in the streets, in the houses, everywhere. There are nurseries in that county that are falling and the children cannot even go outside to play because the pathways are turning to dust. I keep saying it is only a matter of time. To use the word "block" is inaccurate. It is in the aggregate stone. When they quarried into the quarry and they hit the vein of pyrite, pyrrhotite or whatever it was, that was the infection. That was the core. It came out, it went into the marketplace and it spread throughout.

Amendment No. 2 in the name of Deputy Charles Ward has been ruled out of order as it involves a potential charge on the Revenue.

Amendments Nos. 3, 13, 62 and 74 are consequential on amendment No. 63. Amendments Nos. 3, 13, 62, 63 and 74 are related and may be discussed together.

I move amendment No. 3: In page 5, between lines 26 and 27, to insert the following: “(3) The Building Control Acts 1990 to 2020 and Part 3 may be cited together as the Building Control Acts 1990 to 2025.”. Amendment No. 3 is a standard provision to allow for the collective citation of the Building Control Acts 1990 to 2025. It refers to Part 3, which is the Part being inserted into the Bill by a later amendment related to the Building Control Acts. Amendment No. 13 defines the key term “Principal Act” used in Part 2. Amendment No. 62 defines the key term “Act of 1990” used in Part 3. Amendment No. 63 provides for the amendment of section 3 of the Building Control Acts. This amendment introduces an additional power by which the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage may make building regulations. The amendment facilitates the provision of information in respect of systems installed in a building in order to provide the end user with the information necessary to support the efficient and effective operation and use of a building after completion. The systems being installed in buildings today were not envisaged when the Building Control Act was written in 1990. As the complexity of what we build increases, so does the need to understand the operation of the systems in order to ensure that buildings can be operated and maintained in accordance with the design intention. As such, the provision of information to an owner of a building at the time of completion will facilitate this when the operation and maintenance becomes important. Amendment No. 74 proposes a change to the Long Title of the Bill to reflect, in the main, additional matters relating to the amendments to the Building Control Act 1990, namely, “to amend and extend the Building Control Act 1990 to provide for regularisation certificates of compliance on completion in certain circumstances; to change the names of certain certificates issued under that Act; to confer on the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage the power to make regulations relating to enforcement notices; to extend the powers of authorised persons; to provide for the opening up of works in certain limited circumstances; and to provide for related matters”.

It would be helpful if the Minister were to provide a little more context for amendment No. 63 and the circumstances in which those regulations may be used. What is the origin or intention of this amendment? This is just to help us fully understand its purpose and scope, and whether it relates to the more substantive issue of amendment No. 74 and the regularisation process related to the Building Control Acts. With respect to amendment No. 74, in my contribution to the motion of instruction that we discussed earlier, one of the things I asked the Minister was, given the fact there has not been any Oireachtas scrutiny of the building control amendments, and given that those amendments will require the Minister to produce quite detailed regulations on the regularisation process, whether the Minister will give a commitment to consult the Oireachtas housing committee on those regulations when they are in draft form. Will he give us the opportunity to have a hearing where we not only get to ask questions of the Minister and his officials but also hear from the likes of the National Building Control Office and the building control authorities?

I listened to the Minister speak on the amendments. He referred to the Building Control Acts 1990 to 2025. What the Minister is saying is that for a house built in the 1990s, a section can be put on that house connecting the 1990 blockwork to the 2025 blockwork. Who is going to certify it? I deal with engineers daily. For certification of anything that I need, I would have to get all the different certificates right down to the nails that are used. Everything has to be shown to be job specific. Given the Minister referred to 1990 to 2025, he is now connecting the basis of what is allowed for houses, whereby some part of the house will be removed and the internal structure will be left as it was. How are they going to be joined? The Minister is joining 1990s standards to 2025 standards. He is not taking out one completely and replacing it but actually connecting to it. How can he regulate around that and give guarantees to homeowners that they can remove the outer part of their house, leave the inner part, support the house, connect new blockwork, which is of 2025 standard, to 1990 standard blockwork, and get somebody to certify it? I do not think it can be done. Is the Government going to give a guarantee that it can be certified? If there is an issue afterwards, will the Government take liability for the mess it is now making? The Minister talked about building regulations and building standards. They are upgraded every year. Even from the point of view of hospitals being built, if they go to 1 January of the following year, the regulations can change and they would have to start all over again. Yet the Minister is able to say under those amendments that 1990 standards can be certified with 2025 standards. What has been made excessively clear tonight is that the Government will give the guarantee and take responsibility if there is a breakdown afterwards in the two different contexts of materials from the different eras.

The intention behind amendment No. 63 is to give flexibility to the Minister of the day, where new systems are being used, to be able to require additional information through regulations. I think that is reasonable to allow flexibility and not have to bring in amendments, as such. I am happy to accede to the Deputy's’ request that regulations will be brought before the committee for further scrutiny.

Amendment No. 4 has been deemed out of order as there is a potential charge on the Revenue.

Amendments Nos. 5 to 7, inclusive, and amendment No. 60 are related and may be discussed together.

I move amendment No. 5: In page 5, between lines 26 and 27, to insert the following: “Report on gap between cost of remediation and grant under scheme 2. Within 3 months of the passing of this Act the Minister shall lay before both Houses of the Oireachtas a report examining the gap between the actual cost of remediation for eligible homeowners and the grant provided under the scheme. The report shall set out recommendations for reform of the defective concrete block scheme to ensure that it provides 100 per cent redress to all impacted homeowners.”. The purpose of these three amendments is to give me and my colleagues an opportunity to highlight some of the challenges and weaknesses in the operation of the current scheme. While they are not addressed in the Minister's Bill, it is an opportunity for us to raise them. If they are not addressed at some point, hundreds, if not thousands, of homeowners and tenants will continue to be unable to access the scheme. It is important to reflect on where we are with the scheme. When the Minister's predecessor, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, introduced the revised defective concrete blocks scheme very controversially in this House, railroading through the legislation and ignoring 80 homeowner-drafted amendments, we were told that the revised scheme would address the problems identified by affected homeowners and tenants in the affected counties. What is interesting is that when we look at the figures, the actual number of applicants to the revised scheme is less than the number of applicants to the original scheme. If the revised scheme were better, if the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, had succeeded in fixing the problems of the original scheme based on secondary legislation, there would have been more applications. The most up-to-date figures I have by way of parliamentary question show that there were 1,644 applicants to the original scheme up to the summer of this year, but only 1,152 to the enhanced scheme. We also know that because of many of the deficiencies in the transitional mechanisms between the original and the revised scheme, a very significant number of homeowners are stuck in limbo and unable to transition. The really startling figure relates to the total number of homes that have had work commenced on the property and the total number of homes where full remediation has taken place. Again, I am sure there is a slightly revised number that the Minister has available to him. Only 908 homes had commenced some level of work as of the summer of this year, and only 203 had been completely remediated. If we look at the estimates of the original expert group on defective concrete blocks, estimates that did not fully take into account, for example, social homes, additional private rental homes or non-residential buildings, what that tells us is that the scheme as it is currently in place is failing. Deputy Ward made clear from his contacts with his own constituents - my colleague, Deputy Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, will do the same - that the people who desperately need access to these schemes are simply not getting it. Why is that? Amendment No. 5 points to the single most important reason, which is that it is not a 100% redress scheme. The scheme does not cover the full cost of remediation or the full cost of all of the ancillary charges that homeowners or tenants have to face when remediation is taking place. Until the scheme addresses that fundamental deficit, it will not work. For example, I have spoken to homeowners who are currently getting their homes remediated in County Clare. These are modest-sized homes, one- and two-person bungalows. They have shortfalls in the region of €60,000. I am talking to families in Donegal who have slightly larger homes, but they are completely standard homes in that part of the country, and they are facing deficits of €100,000. What amendment No. 5 speaks to is the need for the Government to fully investigate the gap that is currently taking place between those folks who are remediating, what the grant provision is and what the actual costs to them are, and then bring forward proposals to address that. We have suggested proposals but we cannot table those amendments because they would place a charge on the State. This is, therefore, the only mechanism to do so. Amendment No. 6 deals with the other fundamental weakness of the scheme, which is that it is a grant-aid scheme. We all know the Leinster pyrite scheme was not a grant-aid scheme; it was an end-to-end scheme. It has worked exceptionally well, and one of the reasons it never gets debated in this House is that there are not complaints or problems with the primary purpose of the scheme. The reason is that the people in Leinster who were impacted by pyrite contacted the Housing Agency, which sent out competent professionals who inspected the property and agreed with the homeowners the work that needed to be done, and then, through a properly managed framework agreement, the Housing Agency employed the contractors to undertake the work. It is more efficient and cost-effective, and less stressful to the homeowners. Imagine being a pensioner in Inishowen who is on disability allowance and the Minister's proposition is that the pensioner has to project manage, procure and oversee the demolition and rebuilding of their home. It is a completely ludicrous proposition and we know, from talking to affected homeowners, that it has also led to a significant increase in prices being charged by building contractors and building materials suppliers. An end -to-end scheme is much more sensible. Again, we cannot propose an end-to-end scheme because it would be ruled out of order in accordance with Standing Orders. The purpose of this amendment is, therefore, to require the Minister to examine the merits of such a scheme and bring forward propositions to address it. The final amendment in this group, amendment No. 7, looks at the other barriers. There are some listed in the amendment but there are more beyond that. As regards the damage threshold, if we are serious about having a scheme that is based on the science, as other Deputies have said, it should not be based on a visual inspection but on the actual scientific evidence of the extent of sulphate attack in the deleterious material, based on engineers' reports and laboratory testing. Likewise, while some of what is now in this amendment is being addressed by way of amendments brought forward by the Minister, the continued absence of staged payments, for example, means that unless people have access to bridging finance or capital of their own, even with the offer of a grant, they may not have the capital to undertake the works and, therefore, will be unable to proceed with the remediation. Again, while we have solutions to that, we cannot table them because they would place a charge on the State. Therefore, we want the Minister to examine these issues in a timely manner, based on the real, lived experience of homeowners in Donegal, Mayo, Clare, Limerick and Sligo, and come back with recommendations to change them. To conclude on this grouping, if the Minister does not deal, during his term of office, with these fundamental flaws to both the original scheme and the revised scheme of the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, the scheme will continue to fail. Even with the partial increase in the grant cap for those who will be able to avail of it - there are exclusions and we will come to those on section 8 - without these more fundamental changes, raising the grant will not benefit the vast majority of people who are currently locked out, excluded or unable to utilise this scheme and they will continue to be left behind. This is an issue of equity and fairness. If people affected by pyrite in Leinster received 100% redress with an end-to-end scheme and appropriate ancillary grants, I can see no reason the Government can justify treating the people of Donegal, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Sligo and other potentially impacted counties, including Fingal, as we discussed earlier, from exactly the same treatment. Right now, they are not getting equity, fairness or redress. For these reasons, we recommend all three of these amendments to ensure the Minister takes on the task of investigating coming up with credible solutions to problems that were identified back in 2022 when we tabled amendments to rectify those. The Minister's predecessor did not listen. We are hoping the Minister will listen on this occasion.

The Minister has inherited responsibility for dealing with this deep scandal and crisis. Even if he does not accept our amendments, I ask him to please listen and reflect on everything we will tell him because they are absolute facts from the ground. I can speak with authority about Donegal and other colleagues can speak about their counties. I know for a fact that some of the Minister's colleagues are telling him the scheme is working. As I have said to other people, that is their view. They are telling the Minister the scheme is fine, it is grand and he just needs to tinker around the edges, and that is what this legislation he has brought before the Houses is doing. Let me tell the Minister some home truths. The scheme works for a minority of people with an age profile probably in their 40s and 50s. They are people who can access €40,000, €50,000, €60,000, or maybe a bit more, and they may have family who are in the building game and they can project manage it. They have the energy to do it. It works for a minority of people who are willing and will say they will put €50,000, €60,000, €70,000 or €80,000 in. However, a large majority of the homeowners have a different age profile or just cannot afford the sum of money it would take. I have told the Minister a story and I will tell him it again because we have to humanise these things. Sometimes it is about statistics and data. I met a man at the site of his previous house, which had been demolished. All of his family memories were gone, packed into storage in the garage beside the house. As the Minister knows, garages are not included in this scheme. This man was traumatised. Then he told me about the choices he had to make when he went to the bank because the gap was huge. This is why I ask the Minister to please agree to amendment No. 4. The man had a mortgage with about six years left and, as I recall, the repayments were €900 per month. It is a great place to be in life, is it not? You are nearly there, having worked hard all of your life, which is the dream, and then maybe you can enjoy your retirement. That is what we all signed up for. He was told by his bank that the gap is almost €200,000. That is what he has to find and he is getting on with it. Does the Minister want to know what the mortgage repayment is now? It is €1,800, double what it was and it will be for 21 years. He will be still be paying his mortgage when he is a very old man. That is just pure cruelty and it is just one story. I could talk for the rest of the time allocated tonight about other stories. I ask the Minister to please listen to us. This is cruelty. The Minister rightly listened to the voices of pyrite campaigners in Dublin and north Leinster. They were tremendous campaigners. The Minister put in place a scheme and, as Deputy Ó Broin said, no one in here is complaining about that scheme. It is 100% redress and it is delivered by the State. The State takes responsibility for the project management, tendering and all of those engagements. Why on earth has the Minister been so cruel? Why have the officials in his Department been so cruel that they believe we have to have a different standard than the rest of the country? Why are our people tortured with bureaucracy and with having to find the amounts of money required? I will never forget the last time legislation on this came through this House in 2022. It was rammed through with no scrutiny. There was one day, thanks to the members of the committee who got the Bill, to discuss it. I think it was maybe for three or four hours. That was what was called "scrutiny" of a huge Bill. The campaigners up there in the Public Gallery were utterly traumatised. They were banging on the screens. They could not believe what they were seeing. I will never forget the look on their faces outside and in the days afterwards because they were absolutely betrayed. It was a scheme that they warned the Minister was deficient. This is about equality for victims. When I have addressed parliamentary questions to the Minister and his predecessor, the senior officials write the responses. We know that. In the responses, the Minister says it is 100% redress based on the SCSI, costing. I will tell the Minister another home truth now. The Minister's predecessor, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, asked the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland to do a report on the costings in the regions affected. That report was requested in 2023 and the report was published in March 2024. Since then, which is pretty much two years, there has been a huge increase in costings. I had to have a protracted engagement with the Department, by the way. The Ceann Comhairle's office had to intervene to ensure I could squeeze the answer out of the Minister. The Minister has not asked SCSI to do fresh costings, and I know why. If the Minister does that, the logic will follow that he will have to put more money on the table and make the scheme worth more. I am convinced that the political advice given by the then Attorney General, Paul Gallagher, which is in the public domain, was about saving money. I am convinced that advice was that a scheme based on real science where houses were to be knocked down, and about equality between people all around Ireland who were victims, was not to be progressed. We are asking the Minister to accept amendments Nos. 5 to 7, inclusive. If he decides for political reasons tonight to press on with this as happened in 2022, I ask him as a human being to go away and reflect. If the Minister politically makes a decision to ram this through, not accept amendments and believe that his scheme is working, I ask him to reflect as a human being and to look in the mirror and ask himself if it is right to leave aside that man I told him about earlier who will be paying a double mortgage for the rest of his days, into his old age. How on earth is that 100% redress? How dare anybody write a reply to a parliamentary question for the Minister or come before an Oireachtas committee and tell us that is 100% redress? For God's sake, we are talking here about large numbers of families whose lives have been destroyed. The horror of your house falling apart around you and the trauma for your children is all you and your wife or partner will talk about. There are marriages destroyed, families destroyed, lives destroyed. All we are asking is that every victim have a real chance to rebuild their lives and for that to be managed by the State without distress. This involves it being project managed, the State dealing with the contractors and getting a fair price. This scheme, however, is designed to exclude people. Any public representative from Donegal who tells the Minister that this scheme is working is doing a huge disservice to our people. They did not listen to our people. They must only have friends who are wealthy because it is wrong. Imagine a scheme that is not based on the worst houses, the most dangerous houses, getting repaired first. The current scheme is based on who can access money to rebuild their homes. That is madness. If your house is black with mould - we have seen the videos repeatedly - if the blocks are falling down and a danger to your family and children, or if you are in terror of the latest named storm that is coming along, that does not matter. You only need to have enough money in your pocket to make the scheme work. Whatever decision the Minister makes tonight - we will have votes - I am asking him to go away and reflect. I am asking him to hear us. Other colleagues will talk about their counties. These amendments go to the core of the issue. They ask the Minister to do evidence-based research. They ask him to look at the facts on the ground. They ask him to stare the truth in the face and do what is right. That is what these amendments do and I am asking him, please, to not vote them down. He will be in that chair for a while and I will tell him something now. If he does what he did in 2022 and rams deficient legislation through again and does not listen to us, I can promise him that either he or the next person in his office will be here again because the Government will have to bring in legislation that is fair and just. This scheme is going to hit the rocks. People are going to be left behind. We will not stand for it and we will be back here again. Either the Minister does the right thing now or he, or the person who replace him, will come back and do the right thing in a year or two years. I will make the Minister that promise. When we are old men and we sit down together and reflect on our days in politics, the Minister will tell me I was right in what I have said here.

I will give a flavour of the facts on the ground. On option 1, Donegal County Council states - I just got this in - that 121 houses have been built since the scheme came in. In total, 229, 92 combinations and eight option twos. When you outlook option 1, that is 121. Anything else is a remediation option that will be coming back to visit at expense to the Exchequer. That is failure. For us to service, let us say, 10,000 houses in Donegal when we know there is a case for 25,000, if we are doing it properly, we need to be doing 700 houses for the next 15 years. Our numbers in Donegal last year were 382 homes built throughout the whole county. That means for us to do the defective concrete homes will take over 200 years. We do not have the people to rebuild the homes. We are doing it at the dearest rate possible. It is €4.35 a block. If you are a blocklayer, you will be looking at €4.35 a block and think that is great, but they are not going to come up to Donegal because they can get that money in Dublin. They cannot get it in other parts of the country but they are looking, because other parts of the country are affected too. We have out-of-control building costs. At the current rate of progress, it will take 200 years to redo the houses in Donegal. We have not only to do that; we have other issues too. The fact of the matter is the population is growing in Donegal and we cannot build enough houses. We cannot live in a commencement; we can live in completions and completions are what we need. There are 300 houses going forward, but it is still not going to hit the targets. We are still not going to hit 1,000 houses a year to get us out of here in 15 years. Could you imagine being in this in 15 years' time? I know we are going to be here in 15 years' time. We are going to be talking about this in 15 years' time and it is not going to be €4 a block; it is going to be €8 a block. We have the opportunity, if we go end-to-end, to have the power of bulk-buying. I have been saying this for years. Bulk-buying is the only way. A builder goes in and gets ten trusses for roofs but a company can go in and get 10,000. The price differential is massive. That is the only way we can do it, save the State money and start building houses on the scale we need in Donegal.

I support these amendments. They are sensible amendments and they lay out what is wrong with this scheme. Although this is legislation to lift the cap and the cap needs to be lifted, the fact is that lifting the cap alone, in combination with what the Minister is proposing here, is not enough. We know what works and we know what does not work. The end-to-end Fingal pyrite scheme has worked really well. It has been effective. It does not get talked about very much. Pyrite does not get talked about much any more here because when people access the scheme, the scheme is well managed by the Housing Agency, it is end-to-end and it does not place the responsibility on homeowners. What the Minister is proposing here, however, is exactly in line with what he is proposing in relation to defective apartments, and it will not and cannot work. It disproportionately benefits people who have access to at least some financing and it disproportionately discriminates against the poorest people, the most vulnerable people, people who are in receipt of social welfare payments, people who are on low incomes and people who struggle day to day. It would be sensible for the Minister to come back in relation to amendment No. 5 and lay a report before the House of the Oireachtas on transitioning this scheme to an end-to-end scheme that provides 100% redress. There are issues that need to be addressed around mandatory foundation testing, eligibility criteria and retrospective payments. Some of my amendments were ruled out of order, in particular in relation to the arbitrary date of 29 March which makes absolutely no sense except from a cost saving point of view. To go back to a point others made earlier, this is being done to save the State money. That is why we have had this botched scheme, the revised scheme and now we have this Bill before us regarding the cap. We must also see legislative provision to hold to account those responsible for this. At the moment, every single one of us is paying for this because we all pay the concrete levy. Another important part of this amendment is extending the scheme to the rest of the country. Looking at the heat map, obviously there is a high concentration in Donegal, a concentration in Mayo and to a lesser degree in Limerick and Clare. The scale is completely under-reported. Many homeowners are extremely reluctant to come forward. Even the time it took to get Fingal onto the scheme - the bones of four years - shows it is crazy to continue along those lines. A constituent came to see me. Her house is affected by defective concrete. She lives in the heart of Limerick. She is a single mother in her late 40s. She is a significant part of the way through her mortgage. She realised her home was defective when she went to get the walls pumped as part of the SEAI grant, which exposed all the cracks. The issue now for this is woman is that she is €125,000 to €130,000 short. She has no way of coming up with that financing. She is dependent on one income and she has a mortgage to pay which is not insignificant. She is essentially stuck. We need industry accountability, retrospective payments and mandatory foundation testing. That is why, even if the Minister is pressing on with this, he must take on board the amendment and come back to us with a comprehensive piece of work in the next couple of months. Let us look at this in detail and in sincerity. As others have said, an end-to-end scheme would save the State money in the long run. We are going to be back here again, God help us, at some stage, tweaking this again because we will find uptake is low and the gap in costs widening. Construction inflation is growing and everything is going up in cost. Whatever headway is made from lifting the cap, it will be lost again and we will be back here again.

As other speakers said, this has not been costed since 2022. I will give the Minister a small few facts and it will not cost the State anything. I know the funds myself on a year-to-year basis for building costs. In 2021, the average cost of building a 2,000 sq. ft house was €120 per sq. ft on a greenfield site with a builder's finish. It cost €240,000 in 2021 with VAT of €32,400 on top that. In 2023, it was €180 per sq. ft. The same house went from €240,000 to €360,000 and the VAT was €48,600. In 2024, it was up to €200 per sq. ft - the same house with nothing extra. It cost €400,000 in 2024 and €54,000 VAT. If someone takes on a Government contract tomorrow morning, built into that contract, if the project goes over due to inflation over a certain percentage, is the adding on to the contract once the engineers can prove the material has moved. I said this in the Dáil last week and read out the letter, and it is ironic, that the same umbrella group from which the concrete products came - some, not all of its companies - sent a message through all their companies around Ireland that there would be an 8% increase in concrete products across the board. It was not one company saying it, it was the umbrella group sending it out through all its companies and the Government announced a 10% increase in the building. It has come out with 8% on concrete products alone. That is on top of what I am talking about here. I have been talking about greenfield sties. We now have to look at dismantling houses and getting rid of the material environmentally and with the proper certification. The costs are astronomical. Another €20 or €30 per sq. ft can be added to that and that is based on 2024 prices. We are talking about people who are short of money. A small thing that could go towards it, for the costing of the house, would be a VAT exemption. Why not? Based on 2024 prices, that would give them an extra €54,000 on a house towards the money they cannot raise. The Government could also, based on the Government doing its own contracts, fund it itself. The Government is going to give them the money in the first place, so why not fund it itself based on the engineers' reports? People would then not have to try to raise €200,000, €300,000 or €400,000 to rebuild a house or pay the VAT rate. Based on 2025 costings, taking in the remedial work that has to be done outside of the scope of works, the VAT is probably €70,000 based on a 2,000 sq. ft house. That €70,000 could go towards the rebuilding of their house if they get the costings. That would go some way to addressing inflation of costs. There is a 5% levy on all concrete products that was brought in. The same companies that were the problem announced an 8% increase this month. I am told it is coming in from 1 January. That same company in the past two years has given a 34% increase on all concrete products and the Government is charging a 5% levy on top of that. When will a regulation be put in place to tackle the elephant in the room? There are people who built their houses and got HomeBond and all these other certifications for their houses which are now falling down around them and the quarries that caused the problem are putting up their prices under an umbrella group. People trying to build houses are getting a 5% levy on all concrete products and everyone in the country building today is paying for the mistakes that were not regulated at the time. For somebody getting their house costed at the moment, based on today's prices, the VAT could help that burden. That is a solution for part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the Government is paying this as 100% redress, as the Minister said. Why does it not fund the people and give bank guarantees to them in the same way as for anyone building a new house today? Why does it not give people their payments based on the building as it goes on? If a person has to come up with a small bit of money, they can try to fundraise themselves. That, to me, is a solution. Why would the Minister charge tax on redress of 100%? Addressing this is within his remit. If I am pricing a project, it is based on a period of three months. How long is it going to take for the system to come into place and how long is it going to take for people to qualify? By the time the Minister moves the goalposts, prices will have gone up again. Is there not something to be said for index-linking based on the cost of prices going up now and on current inflation costs, as shown by economists? All of this is at the Minister’s fingertips. I have to cost daily, so why can the Minister not do so? Where there are Government contracts, rising costs are built in. Therefore, why can this not be done for everyone else? I want the Minister to exempt the tax people are supposed to pay where there is 100% redress. This will go some way towards paying for the houses that need to be rebuilt.

I wish to speak to amendments Nos. 5, 6 and 7. Unfortunately, this is a bit like playing handball against a haystack because I do not believe the Minister is going to change his mind on any of these amendments. Through the vote we have had on the amendment on blocks, he has made Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs from all of the impacted counties, including Mayo, do something they know is absolutely wrong. One hundred percent redress means 100%, not more or less; it is just what it takes to make up for the lack of legislation or the failures by the Government. It is not because of any failure of the homeowners, as we have said many times here, but because of the abject failure of the Government that 100% redress is needed. People have never been given an explanation as to why those in Mayo and other counties along the western seaboard are treated differently from those who availed of the wraparound scheme that was in Dublin. If somebody gave us a rationale for it and stated how it is and has to be, we could look at that. Everybody here has tabled amendments in good faith to improve the scheme and make it fit for purpose. When we submitted all our points on the original scheme, including those we are making now, we wanted to save the Government money. Our bottom line was that we wanted to ensure nobody would be locked out of the scheme because they could not afford to get into it. By rejecting amendment No. 5, the Minister would be continuing to lock people out who cannot afford to get into the scheme. This is because the gaps we are talking about are €40,000, €50,000, €60,000 or €100,000-plus. That is an awful lot of money and it is absolutely crucifying people. It is not only crucifying the mortgage holders, as their children will be paying back because of the huge gaps. In amendment No. 6, we are asking for the end-to-end remediation scheme for all those impacted by defective concrete blocks. To add insult to the injury of the levy on the products, the State is charging VAT on top. You could not make this up. It is totally wrong. I want to turn to the issue of retrospective payments. It is now many years since I went to a house in Ballycastle that was falling down completely. At the time, we did not really know what was happening. I said to the couple affected, who had to rebuild the house and who had saved all their lives, that something had to be done with the house. I said the county council could not help them out but that I was sure that if they kept all their receipts and kept every record properly such that the project could be thoroughly audited, they would not be excluded from any scheme put in place. If the Minister is going to refuse to accept amendment No. 7, he will be saying to the couple that there is nothing for them and that, even though they did nothing wrong and instead did everything right, leaving everything fit for audit, they are still excluded. They are neighbours of the Minister’s TDs in Mayo. They know them, they know their faces, and they know their families. I am totally dismayed. If somebody were standing up here trying to be obstructive or to get in the way of what needed to be done, I would ignore that, but that is not happening. We are not only seeking to protect homeowners and have fair play for them but we are also seeking to save the State millions of euro. What the Government is doing tonight by not accepting the amendments is costing the State millions of euro. That will come back to haunt it and the people involved in this.

The amendments we are dealing with in this legislation - the amendments tabled by the Sinn Féin Deputies - go to the very core of the issue. If accepted by the Minister, they would probably satisfy the vast majority of people in my constituency regarding the challenges they have. Of course, there are other issues, including those related to the administration of the scheme and the criteria, but a core issue is the 100% redress, as we lay out in amendment No. 5 and as campaigned for in my constituency and elsewhere for many years. Despite the campaign, the Government fails to acknowledge the reality that people will be left behind until redress of 100% is provided. In amendment No. 7, we have put forward an amendment dealing with the fact that what is required is an end-to-end remediation scheme for all those impacted by defective concrete blocks and related building materials. That is also fair because asking individuals who never thought they would be project-managing the rebuilding of their homes to take on that responsibility, whether they are young or old, single or married, is absolutely appalling. It was not requested in other areas where there were defects and it should not be asked of people in my constituency or others right across the State as the number of victims of this scandal increases. Amendment No. 7 also deals with issues such as retrospective payments, an issue that has seen so many people, including early movers, insulted. Also, there are the issues of the damage threshold, semi-detached properties and side-by-side remediation. I have heard my colleagues speak about the real impact of this legislation and of what our amendments would do for the lives of people across the State. What is going to be the end point of this legislation that the Minister is putting through tonight? If he is being true to himself and knows anything about how this matter is playing out on the ground, he will know there are people who will not be able to rebuild their homes. Therefore, in five years or ten years, this issue will not have gone away. The affected homes are going to deteriorate and crumble, and their owners are going to be prisoners within them because the Government has a scheme that does not allow them to rebuild. Under the scheme, people are forced to find tens of thousands of euro. I spoke to one individual who described the absolute nightmare he went through for a number of years. I asked him what he thought it would cost his own pocket. He said he did not even want to think about it, but it was probably in the range of €80,000 to €100,000. That is money people do not have. I spoke to a fellow here last night who was not even at the stage of tenders and so on. They are accepted for demolition. They are not even thinking about where the money would come from. This scheme fails people of all types. It fails people because the Government is demanding of them that they put their hands in their pockets, go into debt and find tens of thousands of euro, whether they are borrowing it for families, digging into nest eggs or whatever it is, for something that they had no hand, act or part in. The fact is that their homes were built with deleterious materials. Indeed, it is the State that is responsible, that should be regulating these products and that is culpable, and that is why 100% redress should be provided. The Minister might try to fool himself. Those in the Government parties who will vote for this Bill might try to fool themselves. I agree with Deputy Conway-Walsh that there are TDs who are genuine because they know neighbours and, in some cases, family members who are involved, but they know that this legislation is locking them into a nightmare, not for next year or the year after, but for tens of years. There are elderly people who have no income outside of the State pension. Where will they get the €50,000, €60,000 or sometimes €90,000 to rebuild their house? This is not going away. We will be back here and the only thing that will change is that these homes will be more expensive to rebuild in the future because the Government is refusing to deal with the reality here and now. This crisis is only getting bigger. I see it in my county. Deputy Mac Lochlainn comes from the epicentre of the crisis in Donegal, the Inishowen Peninsula. You would find it tough to walk the length of yourself and not know somebody who was living in a home that was crumbling, who was a victim of the defective block scandal. That has spread in the east of the county and elsewhere in the west of the county. Every single day, we hear of more and more cases in the west, whether in Gweedore, Glenties or Kilcar. It goes right through. I have seen what Charlie McConalogue put out and it is insulting, because people who are living this nightmare know the reality. If the Minister thinks this is going away, it is not. I genuinely believe that the Government needs to just bite the bullet on this issue. It would be perverse were it the case, but is it the plan to force people to find the €100,000 to rebuild their homes and then have to deal with the ones who never had that money in the first instance, could not borrow or could not get a loan or another mortgage, and then provide something for them in five, seven, eight, nine or ten years? The Minister needs to get real about this and do the right thing. These amendments are sensible. It is what the campaign and individuals are looking for. It is what Sinn Féin would deliver if we were in government. It is the right thing and the fair thing to do. When people come to me, whether it is somebody looking at a medical issue or a social welfare, or somebody who is living in a home that is crumbling around them, I try to step into their shoes. I try to think of them like my mum, sister or somebody I know personally. On this issue, I find it impossible to step into their shoes because I have been in their homes and I cannot imagine the nightmare that they are going through. What the Government is doing is cruel beyond words. The Minister should accept the Sinn Féin amendments. They make sense. They have the backing of the community and of the campaigns. Whether the Minister likes it or not, legislation will be introduced in this House at some stage with 100% redress, because that is the only way we will deal with this issue once and for all.

Hear, hear.

I want to speak to and support the amendments. The starting point is that, as I have said before in this Chamber, housing is a fundamental human right. I do not think it is a coincidence that there is no mention of housing being a human right in the Government's new housing plan, because what is going on in Donegal, Mayo and other counties, including Limerick, Sligo and Clare, shows why housing is a fundamental human right. We have people, children and families living in housing situations that are completely unsustainable, with holes in walls, children crying and worrying about whether the house will fall down, and families and parents crying at night wondering what they are going to do in these homes. They feel completely unsafe. I have written about the psychological concept called ontological security. It is the sense that we feel completely secure in ourselves as people and in where we are. In housing, that concept is applied to the notion of your home being somewhere where you feel safe deep inside yourself. It is not just whether you are safe from threat of violence, but whether you can rest and be at peace there. In Donegal, Sligo, Limerick and Clare, people clearly cannot be at peace in their homes when their homes are literally crumbling around them. That is why housing has to be treated as a fundamental human right, particularly the standard of that housing. I referred earlier to the briefing paper provided by the Oireachtas. The figures are stark and show that what is currently being done by the Government about defective concrete is absolutely inadequate. Of 3,000 applicants, the number of applicants who have commenced work on both schemes is just 1,000. The number of applicants who have completed the works is just 324. At that rate, it will be next century before the actual issues of defective blocks, defective concrete and defective building materials are dealt with. Donegal is suffering a housing crisis and housing disaster like nowhere else. Where will people go when the work is being done? I just looked on daft.ie. There are just 35 places to rent in Donegal. There were 83 evictions in Donegal in the third quarter of this year. As many evictions will probably happen this year as the number of applicants who have actually had the remediation works completed. There is a cluster of multiple housing crises in Donegal and in the other counties affected. One in four is living on a low income. Where will people get the money to cover the costs when it is not 100% redress? In my view, what it shows is the complete failure of a market approach to housing and the complete failure of regulation. There is no prospect of the disaster that is being lived in Donegal right now being dealt with if we rely on the market to solve it. That is where the State has to intervene. It has to intervene to provide 100% redress. It has to start looking at finance and actually supporting homeowners to have the finance to be able to rebuild, including borrowing and low interest rates, to cover the costs. Where are people going to get the money to do the rebuilding? The idea that they somehow are going to front it up is not on. The employment of construction workers was raised. Who will do the construction? A factory in Cavan which builds modular homes has shut down because of the lack of work and yet the State would not step in, buy it and start producing modular homes that people could move into and the work could be done. The State has to step in in a way that we have not seen this State do since the 1950s and 1960s. It has to do it in Donegal, Limerick, Mayo and Clare, and it needs to be part of us solving our housing crisis. We have a housing crisis in Donegal, as I said, and in these counties where people's homes are crumbling. We also have homelessness there. We have people who cannot afford to rent. We have a generation leaving the country. We have homes that are not up to standard in my constituency, in Ballymun and Finglas. The housing issue in this country is an absolute disaster. It is not just people who cannot buy a home but the quality of homes. The private sector, the market, does not have the capacity to deal with it. We need an emergency State intervention. I believe that requires a State construction company. It requires State finance. It requires the State stepping in or else we will be left with people living in substandard homes, in dangerous homes and without a home, not just for decades to come but, as I said, into the next century.

I want to speak on this issue because it will affect dozens, if not hundreds, of people in my constituency, particularly in west Sligo where an awful lot of people are now coming to the realisation that their homes have been affected by defective building materials and concrete blocks and, indeed, other concrete products that went into their houses. This is not new, of course. Donegal, Mayo and other areas, all the way down to Clare, have suffered the same. The scheme the Minister is putting forward does not go far enough to be able to deal with these issues. That is why I wanted to speak in support of the amendments because these amendments go to the heart of the issue. We are talking about making sure that people get 100% redress. We are talking about ensuring that people have an adequate sense of somebody having their back because they have been let down for so long by so many. The reason we are in this situation is very lax regulation; that is the reality. The quarries that produced these defective products have got away with it and now the houses that were built are crumbling around their owners. These people absolutely need to ensure that we can do something which will be adequate to provide for them and for their future. I have come across people in my constituency who are at the very early stages of this. They are noticing cracks and seeing things, although they are certainly not as advanced as we see in Inishowen and other parts of the country. They recognise the fight that people there are having to try to get adequate redress and they are wondering if they will be facing the same down the road. It is not just in that part of Sligo, but in other areas as well because many of these building companies and quarries shared products over and back. When one supplier of blocks was running low, it got a couple of loads from somewhere else. So, somebody bought blocks from one particular supplier not knowing that the product had come from a different quarry perhaps 50, 60 or 100 miles away. This will spread across a large area of the country. It will not be confined to the counties which have got the go-ahead to be in this scheme. The Minister really needs to consider that this will be a much more widespread problem as we move forward. One of the big issues people are coming across is where they are going to go while they are getting this work done. They simply cannot rent a house anywhere else because there are no houses to rent. They cannot find any way out of this problem. Some people have decided that they have to buy a mobile home or get some kind of a demountable dwelling or something put on their back street, if they can. Even that is very difficult because they do not have the money to invest in all of this. They certainly do not have the confidence to be able to go and borrow that money because they do not know if the Government scheme will back them up. That is the problem we have got here. We also have the issue of who will do the work. Where will they get the workers to do this? We are in a real crisis here and one of the few things we would expect people to be able to stand by is that the Government that let them down in the past by allowing these lax regulations that got them into this mess in the first place would now step up to the plate and ensure that there is adequate redress and an adequate scheme, so that they can have the confidence to be able to look to the future. However, very many people cannot look to that future. This is why I implore the Minister to look again at these amendments and not just cut them down. He should not put us in the position where we will be coming back again and again representing our constituents in my area and all the other areas around the country affected by this problem. It affects many other parts of the country as well. It will not be isolated to a few small areas. It may become very widespread in the future because defective building materials were not confined to county boundaries. They did not put up a fence and say, "You can't cross here". They have gone all over the place and there needs to be recognition of that as well. Even at this late stage, it is not too late to step up, accept the amendments and put a scheme in place that would provide for people. That would ensure we have something in place which will save time, give people confidence and actually save money in the long run. That is what the Minister needs to do. I appeal to him at this stage, on behalf of my constituents in Sligo-Leitrim and people across the whole country who are affected by this, to step up to the plate here, recognise that what he is doing is flawed, accept the amendments and move this legislation forward in such a way that we can have confidence and the people who are in this terrible mess can have confidence in their future.

I feel I must intervene in this debate. I am quite sure there was no reflection on me when it was suggested that there are those who say that it is working and it only needs tweaking at the edges. It is not working and it needs a lot more than tweaking at the edges. I said in the debate on Second Stage that I had the honour of representing this country in the United States a number of years ago as Minister of State. I went to New Orleans and I remember the catastrophic, severe flooding the city had when buildings fell overnight. When I went around my constituency, I saw buildings that are crumbling slowly in Donegal. It is not just about bricks and mortar. It is about the human factor. It is about the mental stress on people. It is about families who can no longer afford to send their children to school and the children who are pleading with their parents to allow them to go out and work to try to help them to repair or rebuild their homes. While this is not a matter for the Minister but one for the NSAI, we have the ludicrous situation that some people were made an offer to have the outer layer replaced. The same blocks are in the inner layer as are in the outer layer. I have called on the NSAI and its chief executive to expedite the amended IS 465 to help them to do that. I have been a loyal party member since I came to the House first in 1981 and I have supported it in every single vote. Of course, I must also remember that I have to be loyal to the people who have elected me over all of those years to the local authority, the Dáil and the European Parliament. I must speak on their behalf. I believe that there is not 100% redress. I am meeting people who cannot raise the funds to have the initial preparatory works carried out. The banks have to take some blame as well. They do not want to help the people affected. I believe, as I have said time and again, that there should be some form of payment made in advance to help these people. It is so bureaucratic. I feel for the those who are involved in the overall system, particularly those in our own local authority who are doing their utmost. They are snowed under with work. I know that extra funds have been provided to help them, but it is not working as quickly as it should. Irrespective of who is here in the future, I suggest that there could be three, four, five or six more Dáileanna and this will still be ongoing. I believe it has to be resolved. One way to resolve it is to give people an opportunity to move into modular homes that can be located in various parts of my county and in other counties. The big problem at the moment is that even if people have the money, they are not in a position to move out or find alternative accommodation. The regulation is now changing and in fairness to the Minister, Deputy Browne, he listened to us when it came to the side-by-side buildings that can be built within the curtilage of the site. There is nothing wrong with doing that, even though there are not exceptional circumstances. That is one aspect of the proposal that I accept. I also believe there should be consistency when it comes to similar types of problems in other parts of the country. It is a serious situation for all of these families. Regarding the blocks, I voted with the Government on that issue. It is the same material going into the foundations that went in to the making of the blocks. It does not make sense. While I support a lot of what has been said, I have always been loyal to my party and I believe I can serve the people of Donegal better if I continue to work with the Minister, who I believe is genuine in trying to resolve this problem, rather than being a hero tonight and voting against my party, as one Deputy did many years ago before evaporating. I feel strongly about this and I have been making a case to the Minister. I am making that case publicly tonight and I will continue to do so. I have never said - and I know the earlier statement was not a reflection on me - that the scheme is working. It is not working.

The human cost of this whole crisis is absolutely incredible. I visited Donegal many times with my good friend Mary T. Sweeney in relation to this particular crisis. I visited many families in many homes who have shown me chimney stacks falling down and massive gaps in the walls of their houses. We have the incredible situation of children sleeping in rooms on windy, stormy nights in fear that the building is going to collapse. I have no doubt this is leading to significant problems physically, but the mental and psychological scars arising from the defective concrete crisis are immense. It has had an enormous impact on the people of Donegal, Mayo, Clare and other counties. The cost of those scars to society is unquantifiable. I have no doubt that many of those scars are going to wash through this generation of individuals. I also have no doubt that there is an enormous lack of accountability. There is no doubt in my mind that the system of light-touch regulation we had in this country over many years, which was overseen by Fianna Fáil, in large part allowed this defective concrete to be sold and put into the housing infrastructure of large parts of this country. Indeed, there is still not accountability in terms of the quality of construction products in the market at the moment. This problem is rife, not only in homes but also in much of the other infrastructure in this country. One of the big frustrations is that the people of Donegal in particular have expended so much energy and effort protesting and trying to get the Government to deliver the responsibility it has for this issue. Yet, here we are in 2025 with a scheme that is deeply flawed and is not 100% redress. There is an enormous gap between the money that is necessary to do the work and the money that is being offered by the Government. This scheme is leaving many families with increased mortgages and debts. It is so difficult to operate that it is impossible for many people to use. I have no doubt that if the people of Donegal were swapped for the people of south Dublin or some other constituency on the east coast, the Government would take a far different approach. The Government is speaking from both sides of its mouth on defective concrete and redress. It is trying to pretend this is something it is not. The people at the difficult end of this, those living in homes that are crumbling around them and trying to get them rebuilt, know this is not true. My worry is that other people watching this debate, the people from other counties who are not directly affected, will just nod their heads and think it is all right and the problem is being sorted out because there is money being spent on it. I appeal to the Minister opposite to listen to the TDs from Donegal, Mayo and other counties and to put himself in the place of an individual who has spent their life savings investing in building a home and is now seeing that home destroyed by a building material that was allowed onto the market as a result of the lack of regulation by a particular government and is then left to swing, in large part, for big chunks of the cost of that. I appeal to the Government to do the right thing and make sure it delivers 100% redress.

There are a few points I wish to make on these amendments. First, option B is what a lot of people in County Clare are getting. It means that outer and inner leaf will have to eventually be demolished, but the roof has to be kept. That is what they are being told. They are all telling me it is impossible to get a contractor. When contractors come out and look at the property, they wonder whether they are going to put stilts under the roof or prop up the roof and ask where they will start the demolition and where they will start the rebuild. The remediation options are not working. As Deputy O'Donoghue said, all building works, small and large, have to be certified and that is proving to be nigh on impossible. It is becoming a churn, whereby remediation options are given and then rejected because no one will stand over them and then they go back in again. That is not working. I remember when we had the large Bill. It was a big evening of vote after vote on Committee Stage, as other speakers said. That evening, the former Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, rather clumsily said, in a retort across the Chamber, that it was taxpayer's money that would pay for the scheme. Many Deputies in the Opposition and on the Government backbenches, as well as member of the media, noted that the people who are affected are the taxpayers of Ireland. It is their homes that are falling in. In an appeasement that evening, which gave great hope to many of us, we heard there was going to be a landmark legal case taken by the State and the Attorney General was preparing a huge case against the quarries and the concrete block manufacturers, one of which is one of the biggest companies in Europe, Roadstone, which is part of CRH. Let us name that company and put a face to this. There was to be a landmark legal case taken so the companies would pay and rather than the taxpayers paying, it would actually be the companies that were culpable that would pay for all of this. I ask the Minister to give the House an update on that. I understand it is a colossal case and it will be challenged. The Minister is a good person but we need to hear there is some movement on that case because someone should pay for this. At the moment, this is on the pages of the Government. It is taxpayer's money funding remediation for taxpayers but someone has to pay for this. The levy in itself is not sufficient. That landmark case must be taken. It would be a bit of retribution, which this country needs. As we were preparing for this Dáil week and printing off our briefing notes, I got an interesting email from someone at home in Clare. There is a recurring theme and I am guessing it is similar in Donegal, Mayo and other places. It was from a builder who stated there is probably a little bit of pyrite or mica in every single block. It is a chemical constituent that is in the ground. It is mined and gets mixed in a batching plant. If there is sufficient cement in the concrete block and it has a decent constitution, it will probably withstand that. In anything I have seen, the common theme is deterioration of the concrete, crumbling and asymmetrical cracking. When I look at the gable end of these houses, I always ask the person if they got pumped insulation. They will say they did and when I ask when, they will say about three years ago. I will then ask when the cracks began and they will say it was about two years ago. It is a common theme. The builder who emailed said we should have our debate and talk about 100% redress and the legal aspects but someone has to scream about the SEAI grants. While they are essential - I am not saying we should scrap or pause them - someone has to give some advisory note to people who are applying for SEAI grants that the house that is beautifully painted and standing proud may become more susceptible. For all we know, there could be deleterious material in those blocks that will be activated when they bore through them and start pumping material into them, which causes water and chemical agents to engage with the blocks. What I am getting at is that I have yet to come across a case that did not involve pumped insulation of cavity walls. Cautionary guidance notes need to be issued that pumped insulation is some form of catalyst. I am not saying the pumped beading is wrong but it gives rise to some chemical reaction that starts to break down blocks. Yet, we are in overdrive with SEAI grants. The people I spoke with in Clare on Monday night said that someone has to scream that this has been a catalyst in their homes and there needs to be a re-examination of the scheme.

I will address amendments Nos. 5 to 7, inclusive, tabled by Deputies Ó Broin, Doherty, McGettigan, Conway-Walsh and Mac Lochlainn, and amendment No. 60, tabled by Deputy Ward. On amendment No. 5, as the Deputies are aware the defective concrete blocks grant scheme is a grant scheme of last resort to provide financial assistance to affected homeowners to remediate their homes and move on with their lives. I therefore cannot accept the amendment. Amendment No. 6 proposes that a report on the legislative changes necessary for an end-to-end remediation scheme be laid before the Oireachtas within three months of the Act coming into operation that details the legislative changes required to operate an end-to-end remediation scheme. The defective concrete blocks grant scheme relates to dwellings which are damaged due to the use of defective concrete blocks. Under the defective concrete blocks grant scheme, there are five potential real mediation options, with a bespoke solution potentially required for each affected home and which provide solutions. Therefore, for that reason I cannot accept the amendment. Amendment No. 7 proposes that a report on the barriers to inclusion in the scheme be laid before the Oireachtas within three months of the Act coming into operation that sets out reforms to the defective concrete block grant scheme in order to remove potential barriers. The amendment lists the following four headings for inclusion in the report: "the operation of the damage threshold"; "the issue of semi-detached properties"; "the issue of side-by-side remediation"; and "the issue of retrospective payments". The damage threshold is an integral part of the defective concrete blocks grant scheme that is necessary to ensure homes with a minimum level of damage can access grant payments under the scheme. The Bill, primarily under sections 8 and 10, includes amendments to the principal Act to provide for the retrospective payments and these will be discussed under amendments Nos. 33 and 35. The two Committee Stage amendments covered under amendments Nos. 20 and 40 have also been brought into the debate. These amendments address issues relating to semi-detached properties and, in limited circumstances, a provision to construct an adjacent dwelling. I am not, therefore, in a position to accept the amendments. Amendment No. 60 proposes that a report examining various matters is laid before the Oireachtas within three months of the Act coming into operation. The amendment lists the following four headings for inclusion in the report: "international models of defective building compensation"; "the effectiveness and fairness of the charging order system"; "administrative options for reducing long-term homeowner liability without additional Exchequer cost"; and "the impact of the current scheme design on mortgageability and housing mobility". As Deputy Ward is aware, the defective concrete blocks grant scheme is not a compensation scheme. A charging order under the defective concrete block scheme for rental properties is required to help to ensure remediated properties remain available to rent once remediation works have been completed. Officials in the Department, with the assistance of various stakeholder groups, have worked over the past four years with key stakeholders to help to ensure matters relating to homes affected by defective concrete blocks with mortgages have been addressed. For these reasons, I cannot accept the amendment.

Are there any further contributions?

I will press amendment No. 5.

I move amendment No. 6: In page 5, between lines 26 and 27, to insert the following: “Report on legislative changes necessary for end-to-end remediation scheme 2. Within three months of the passing of this Act the Minister shall lay before both Houses of the Oireachtas a report detailing the necessary changes to primary and secondary legislation to allow for the operation of an end-to-end remediation scheme for all those impacted by defective concrete blocks and related building materials.”.

I ask Deputy Ó Broin to move amendment No. 7. It is a new section and has already been discussed with amendment No. 5.

I move amendment No. 7: In page 5, between lines 26 and 27, to insert the following: “Report on barriers to inclusion in scheme 2. Within three months of the passing of this Act the Minister shall lay before both Houses of the Oireachtas a report examining barriers to full inclusion of affected homeowners and others in the scheme including: (a) the operation of the damage threshold; (b) the issue of semi-detached properties; (c) the issue of side-by-side remediation; (d) the issue of retrospective payments. The report shall set out recommendations for reform of the defective concrete block scheme to remove these barriers.”.

I move amendment No. 8: In page 5, between lines 26 and 27, to insert the following: “Report on supportive measures for rental property activation in areas impacted by defective concrete blocks 2.The Minister shall, within 3 months of the passing of this Act, prepare and lay before Dáil Éireann a report on supportive tax measures for rental property activation in areas impacted by defective concrete blocks.”. This is an amendment I tabled to the Finance Bill. I also tabled a detailed amendment which was dealt with during the Finance Bill debate. In fairness to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Harris, who is new to his brief, he said, to paraphrase, there was merit in what was being raised and he would engage constructively with the Department and the Minister for housing, Deputy Browne, in that regard. He made the point, which is a fair one, that it is the Minister for housing or a different Department that comes up with a scheme. The Department of Finance is then asked to examine the merits of the scheme and whether it has a tax implication. It has to originate from another Department, however. The Minister mentioned that this legislation was coming up as a potential way to deal with this. That is why it is raised here. To provide context to this amendment, we talked earlier about the core issues with the flawed scheme that is and will continue to be in existence after this legislation. A number of core issues were dealt with in Sinn Féin amendments, such as 100% redress and an end-to-end scheme, that, unfortunately, the Government parties rejected. This is more of a tangential issue. It is not going to change the world for people; the major problems will still exist. For people going through the scheme, however, there is a major issue of housing. Where will they live during the remediation of their house? Where will they live as the house is being knocked to the ground and rebuilt? While there are a number of ways to deal with that, the one way not to is exactly what the Government is doing, that is, nothing. The Government is basically leaving it up to individuals to try to find mobile homes or demountables, move in with neighbours or family or search for rental properties in a county where they are few and far between. We need a bit of forward planning in this regard. There are a number of parts to the solution, including the accommodation of modular homes. I think Deputy Ward has an amendment later on that and Deputy the Cope Gallagher mentioned that possibility as well. They could be accommodated in certain areas. I am conscious that I speak on behalf of Donegal because it is the people of Donegal who put me here. I am conscious too that individuals in Mayo, in Clare, and elsewhere are also affected. The one thing that those counties have is a lot of vacancies, including a lot of holiday homes. I dealt with a family recently who are in a desperate situation. They cannot find a place to live. They literally cannot find a place to live. They are competing with people who have got notices to quit and they are competing with families who maybe want to move into the area and so on. The housing is not there. Yet we all know in our local communities, if we look around, that there are a lot of vacant houses. There might be a house that was in a family's ownership, the mother or father may have passed away or a brother may have passed away or so on and it was left to an individual. There are a lot of holiday homes as well in Donegal and down the west coast. This amendment is trying to incentivise. It is not for the rental sector because we do not want to interfere with the rental sector. The rental sector is there and we do not want to compete with that sector. We want to try to entice people who own homes that are not permanently occupied to make them available to individuals who are having their homes demolished and rebuilt under the scheme. The template that I came up with is to ensure that the rental income they would receive as a result of that, received only from somebody who is going through the scheme, would be exempt from tax. Is there a precedent for this? Yes. The Government introduced the accommodation recognition payment, ARP, which is only available to Ukrainians. In the county of Donegal there are over 2,000 homes that are rented out to Ukrainians and the rental income is tax free for the owners of those homes. This is in no way about pitching one over the other. It is absolutely not about that. It is about stating this already exists in law. It exists for what is called a humanitarian disaster. I have my own issues in relation to that scheme because it does interfere with the rental market and belatedly the Government has recognised that. The proposal in this amendment would not do that because it would only be for those properties that were not rented, or should be registered with the Residential Tenancies Board, in the last three years. It is very much targeted at vacant homes that have never been rented or holiday homes where somebody might be willing to do this for the year and a half during which families are rebuilding their homes. That is what this amendment is about. This can happen. I understand that the Government will not budge on the other issues. They have just voted down what are sensible amendments but this can happen. This provision already exists in my county and elsewhere in a big way for Ukrainians but it does not exist for people from Donegal or elsewhere whose homes are affected by defective blocks. Will the amendment change the availability of homes overnight? No. But if it deals with one family so that they find a place to live when their home is being rebuilt then so be it. The beautiful thing about this as well is it that is has an endpoint. It is only available through the construction and rebuilding of the home. Hopefully it would also have another benefit, which is to make rental properties cheaper. On rental income, obviously, they are not rental properties at the minute, but the house they would rent out would be cheaper because it would be tax free and that allows for more money to be available to the individual in relation to the rebuilding of their home under the very flawed scheme that we have before us. That is the proposition. The Minister for Finance said there is merit to the issue and wanted to constructively engage with it. I cannot see a reason we do not move on it. It is definitely worth trying. It will not change the world but it could help many families. If we can just do that, it would be a job well done in terms of supporting this amendment.

What we have in Donegal in terms of housing is a perfect storm. We have the same issues as everywhere else around the State. There was a period of ten or 11 years where virtually no social housing was built in Donegal. Therefore, the private rental sector took on that role through the rental accommodation scheme and the housing assistance payment. We are now playing catch up. All of those private rental properties were taken up by that failure in that period from 2010 to 2021, which was an 11-year period. I will give an example. There were more social houses delivered in Donegal in one year in 2002 than in the 11 years since 2010 to 2021. That was a disastrous period and a disastrous policy. House prices in the county also have gone through the roof relative to income and the cost of rent has gone through the roof. People who work in good jobs, for example a couple with good employment, cannot get a mortgage from the banks. Rent is going through the roof. Rent has doubled in Donegal in the last five or six years. It has really doubled. It is so difficult to find rental property. It is heartbreaking when somebody is told that their rented house is going to be sold and they have to find somewhere else. They cannot find anywhere else. It is pure desperation. We have all of that and defective blocks too. I cannot stress how important this proposal is from Deputy Doherty. As the Deputy has pointed out clearly that it has been done for another humanitarian crisis, why can it not be done for our humanitarian crisis? It could not be more simple. We have a perfect storm housing crisis. We desperately need to free up properties to be used for families while their homes are being rebuilt. I urge the Minister of State to accept this amendment.

It is hard to believe that it is 12 years since this crisis started to unfold. It is hard to believe that we still do not know how many homes, flats, offices, shops, farm buildings, etc., are impacted in the likes of Donegal or Mayo. It also is hard to believe there have been four attempts at rewriting this scheme over that period and yet we are still not at a scheme that is fit for purpose. This amendment speaks to the fact that so many people are snookered and have been left without any real options at the moment. In many of the situations people cannot sell or are struggling to get insurance and people are struggling to get mortgages currently because of the defective blocks and because capacity is being swallowed up with so many people being in such difficulties. Driving around Donegal I was struck that every second building, house, council building, crèche, or business was pointed out to me as the buildings with the cracks that are starting to get worse and worse. Because of that, many people are struggling to get accommodation. When there is a capacity problem of accommodation, you have inflation. This means that families are snookered even trying to get alternative accommodation for themselves in this regard. It is really important that the Government would get creative in ensuring first that there is extra capacity in terms of combination options for people and second that there are some efforts to create downward pressure on the cost of that accommodation to people. There is a big inflationary aspect for people who are looking to get works done. Some of that is happening because of the pressure on the limited capacity but some of that is happening due to the way the money is being paid out. Some builders are front-loading the costs so that they get the money at the start of the process and then have to wait long periods of time to get paid out as well. I support this amendment and I ask that the Government supports it as well.

I agree with Deputy Doherty's proposal in the amendment. We have to think differently and we have to think outside the box about what is coming ahead. Deputy Mac Lochlainn spoke about the lack of homes being built in Donegal and he referred to that period when we had the crash. We are catching up and we have a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep. We have to think outside the box. What Deputy Doherty is suggesting would work but with it we could also take a blueprint that would change housing moving forward and I think this is the start of it. It is the simple steps and it is a good move. There are 25,000 homes in Donegal that will need to be replaced. People will need to be housed but there is nowhere for them to go. As Deputy Hearne stated, there are only a few houses for rent. If we go ahead tomorrow and 50 or 60 homeowners want to opt for the scheme and move forward, there will be nowhere for them to go. We have to think outside the box. We have to do something unique, because we have a humanitarian crisis and a housing crisis in Donegal.

I will now address Amendment No. 8, which was tabled by Deputies Ó Broin, Doherty, McGettigan, Conway-Walsh and Mac Lochlainn. I take the points made by the Deputies that there is an urgent need to increase capacity throughout the country. There is also an urgent need to increase affordability in the housing sector and to increase capacity in the private rental sector and the rental sector in general. This is obviously a very acute issue, particularly in Donegal, which is obviously the county most affected by defective blocks. I accept that amendments can be introduced to try to oblige the Government to bring forward reports on measures. Because this is a tax measure, however, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage has no remit in respect of it. I suggest continued consultation with the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance and his Department. I am not sure whether it was the previous Minister for Finance or the Tánaiste, who took up the role just recently, that the Deputy was consulting with. That would be my suggestion because tax measures are the responsibility of the Minister for Finance as opposed to the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

This is infuriating. The Finance Bill went through in the past ten days. I put this to the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance, and, in fairness, he said that what I was saying had merit. The ARP scheme for Ukrainians that I mentioned was designed and is administered by the Department of justice. The latter went to the Department of Finance looking for the income that is paid for those properties to be tax exempt. The Department of Finance accepted that and legislated for it. However, the scheme starts with the Department of Justice. The Tánaiste made the point that this is a Department of housing issue. He also made the point that this legislation could accommodate it. He further made the point that he would engage constructively with the Minister for housing. The official response now is to go back to the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance. In the meantime, people in my constituency cannot find anywhere to live when they get to the end of the process where they are at the point where their houses are to be demolished. The Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, will understand that if any of those poor creatures are watching in, they will be tearing their hair out. What we are proposing makes sense. If you look at Donegal, not everybody is going to make their home available for a start. This is about trying to help. There are nearly 10,000 vacant homes in Donegal according to the census that was taken just three years ago. That number may have gone down because of the ARP scheme. There are more than 12,000 holiday homes in Donegal. There is a huge level of homes in the county that are not permanently occupied and we have a crisis that nobody has a plan for in the context of where the thousands of people involved are going to go when their houses are demolished. If I was talking to my 15-year-old son, he would say "Dad, I think the solution here is try to look at the vacant houses and how we can try to get them into the system for this short period of time." I have spoken to many people who have vacant homes. As I said, in some cases this may be because somebody has passed away. In other instances, they are holidays homes. As political representatives, we literally have to go to people and ask if their brother's or mother's house could be used or it a holiday home that is only occupied once or twice a year could be used. The people involved may not want to rent out those properties; they may never want to be landlords. However, people who own holiday homes in Donegal know there is a humanitarian crisis there. Many of the people have come to know over the years are in the situation we are discussing. What we are proposing is about trying to provide it a little incentive, a little nudge to help move this forward. The State is paying for this accommodation. It makes sense that it is tax free. I am not only disappointed, I am also frustrated with the official answer that has been offered here. The amendment suggests a deadline. The Minister of State is, I presume, reading from an official script from the Department, which obviously does not have a clue what the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance said previously. I can only assume that he never followed through on what he was stated when this was being dealt with in the context of the Finance Bill. I am really disappointed with the response.

I was not reading from a script. Deputy Doherty mentioned, in the example he provided, that perhaps a policy instruction came from the Department of justice and that the Department of Finance legislated for it. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is legislating in this instance, and there may be policy discussions. Quite often in the context of housing policies we suggest taxation measures. However, those measures are always legislated for by the Department of Finance. We are here dealing with legislation. I am not sure if I am being clear enough on that. If there were taxation measures involved, legislation would have to be brought forward by the Department of Finance, as in the example the Deputy just cited. I appreciate the comments made in relation to rental capacity and capacity in generally, especially in the context of how acute the situation is in Donegal.

I can read the Minister of State what the Tánaiste said when we discussed this issue previously. He stated: I am genuinely grappling constructively with the point the Deputy made on the idea of the ARP. It is not an unfair point. That scheme is administered by the Department of justice. My Department carries out the tax treatment element of the scheme. It is open to other Departments to consider schemes in relation to this area. I will engage constructively with those line Departments in relation to that. There is going to be a review of the scheme and there will be legislation next week. I will engage constructively with the Minister, Deputy Browne, in this regard. If a Department brings forward a scheme, my Department engages with regard to the tax treatment of that scheme. This is two arms of Government that are not talking to each other. People in my constituency have been abandoned as a result. This amendment requests the compilation of a report. I put forward a substantive amendment in the Finance Bill. I also put such an amendment forward here but it was ruled out of order. I am not looking for a vote on this issue; I am looking for a response that says "On this issue, that actually makes sense. We will deal with that on Report Stage of the Bill. The Department will liaise with the Department of Finance and we will bring forward a scheme." That is what I was hoping for. That is what constructive engagement is. Telling me to go back to the fellow who told me to go back to the Department of housing is not on.

I want to deal with the fact that over a year ago we learned that the then Minister, Deputy O'Brien, was going to move on the report from the SCSI and increase the cap by 10%. Immediately, there was an issue that the early movers, namely that those who were already going through the scheme, were going to be left behind. It was made clear that this would apply retrospectively. However, it would require amendments to the legislation. I have to observe, following the exchange between Deputy Doherty and the Minister of State, that we clearly have a Department of housing that is allowed to do what it wants with no political direction. I will never understand how it took over a year to bring this legislation here. In our party we would have been able to draft that legislation within hours. This is not complex legislation. It is applying an increased cap retrospectively to those going through the scheme. There is no political leadership in the Department of housing and the officials will just do what they want. They are not accountable. They write the script for the Minister and they write the replies to parliamentary questions. I could show the Minister of State one reply and then show him another. I will give him an example to do with IS 465 and the application of it by the Housing Agency. The agency was overruling the recommendation of engineers who were on the Engineers Ireland list. These qualified engineers acting on behalf of the families recommended demolition and were overruled by the Housing Agency. When this was questioned, the agency said it was applying IS 465. We all said the emerging evidence was that standard had no credibility and that it was a bad decision the agency was making. I tabled a parliamentary question to the Minister and the officials said they were applying IS 465 in proper order. They were looking at mica. Then a few months later the NSAI finally acknowledged the emerging scientific evidence was very serious and a review had to be done of IS 465. The basis for all this remediation was a hill of beans. All of a sudden the Department officials drafted a new response that said in small print the Minister always told the Housing Agency to look at pyrrhotite. They threw the agency under the bus. There is no political leadership in the Department of housing. The officials will just do what they want. They are not accountable. They will tell you one month the Housing Agency is following IS 465 and mica is the cancer that you have and therefore your house does not have to be demolished. Then a few months later they will say they were wrong about that, but in the small print it is pyrrhotite. They threw the Housing Agency under the bus. I watched that happening. It is time for the Minister for housing and the Ministers of State to listen to us on the ground in our constituencies and give political direction to the officials in the Department. If the Minister and the Ministers of State do not do that the officials will never make any changes. Why would they? The senior departmental officials are not motivated to make any changes. They are not accountable. They will never have to get elected in any of these constituencies. They will never have to face the people of Donegal, Mayo, Sligo, Clare, Limerick and a growing number of other counties, but the Minister and the Ministers of State will. I had to intervene, having watched that exchange, and tell the Minister of State my experience. I hope he will reflect on that, start to show clear political direction, do what is right and not have the officials write scripts that make a mockery of this place.

There were accusations of a lack of political leadership and I have to dispute that. Since the Minister took up the position his focus has been on increasing supply and increasing viability. In the ten or so months he has been in the position he has introduced a range of policy measures and legislation to do that. I know this legislation was also a priority. I am sure Sinn Féin could have drafted the Bill in a number of hours but these Bills have to withstand scrutiny so it is not as simple as the Deputy says. The officials cannot address the Dáil but I will have to defend them as well in terms of their dedication to getting this right. If the Deputy ever gets into power, these are officials he will have to work with so it is a bit disrespectful to point the finger like that. We are here, we are in government, we are the politicians, we are the decision-makers and we are well able to stand up for ourselves.

Are you though?

I had to dispute that. Again, what is being asked for here is a taxation measure and to speak to the amendment, it is something we cannot deal with here.

I would just ask if Deputies are going to interject they stick to the content of the amendment. Deputy Mac Lochlainn.

What I said is very relevant in that a response has been given to Deputy Doherty that clearly contradicts the understanding he was given by the Minister for Finance. One arm does not know what the other arm is doing. In terms of officials, I will just say we had officials come before Oireachtas committees telling us we had 100% redress and they were strongly and robustly told they should not say that and should not insult our people. Then we have parliamentary questions repeating those phrases. It is a two-way process. Respect works both ways and if people do not listen to hurt that is caused by words and they repeat those words you do not get respect for that. I will leave it at that.

When we are talking about scrutiny we have to talk about the fact there is a lack of scrutiny. The Minister of State talks about scrutiny but with the way this has all unfolded over the last few days that is very rich. There was a lack of scrutiny.

Amendments Nos. 9 to 12, inclusive, have been ruled out of order.

I move amendment No. 13: In page 6, between lines 2 and 3, to insert the following: “Interpretation (Part 2) 3. In this Part, “Principal Act” means the Remediation of Dwellings Damaged by the Use of Defective Concrete Blocks Act 2022.”.

Amendment No. 14 in the name of Deputy Sheehan has been ruled out of order.

I move amendment No. 15: In page 6, between lines 5 and 6, to insert the following: “Amendment of section 3 of Principal Act 4. Section 3 of the Principal Act is amended by the insertion of the following subsections after subsection (3): “(4) The Minister shall maintain a single publicly accessible online repository containing: (a) all regulations made under this Act; (b) all ministerial orders made under this Act; (c) all circulars, letters, and guidance issued to designated local authorities or the Housing Agency for the purposes of this Act. (5) Where any such regulatory or administrative document is amended or replaced, the Minister shall update the repository within 7 days.”.”. The amendment requires the Minister to keep all regulations, orders, circulars and guidance under the Act publicly accessible online. Right now these documents are scattered all over the place. It is hard for homeowners, engineers and councils to track all these documents. We need a single updated source that would prevent confusion and mistakes in the scheme. The scheme is already too complex and this would simplify it.

The amendment proposes to insert a new section into the Bill that would amend section 3 of the principal Act. Section 3 relates to regulations made under the principal Act. I understand the Deputy is seeking to mandate an online portal to make the documents relating to the scheme available online. I am satisfied this information is already accessible online through web pages managed by my Department and those operated by designated local authorities and therefore I cannot accept the amendment.

Amendments Nos. 16, 50, 55 and 56 are related and may be discussed together.

I move amendment No. 16: In page 6, between lines 5 and 6, to insert the following: “Amendment of section 5 of Principal Act 4.Section 5 of the Principal Act is amended by the substitution of the following subsection for subsection (5): “(5) A designated local authority shall be responsible for the performance, in its designated local authority area, of the functions assigned to it by or under this Act, and shall, within 3 months of the end of each quarter, publish on its website a summary of: (a) the number of applications received; (b) the number of decisions issued under sections 17, 18, 22, 23A and 23B; (c) average and median decision times; (d) number of appeals lodged and their outcomes; and (e) such other statistics as may be prescribed.”.”. Amendment No. 16 is essential because homeowners have no visibility of how long applications take or where delays are happening. Councils are already struggling, with ancillary grants taking months. Effectively, it is becoming very hard for local authorities to make progress due to the number of staff moving. There is a bottleneck that means families are stuck waiting. If the Minister resists this, it shows he is adding to the council’s workload. The council has been put to the pin of its collar and is not resourced enough. Amendment No. 50 seeks to introduce accountability and transparency into a system that has long been opaque. By requiring the Minister to produce an annual report on the operation of sections 23A and 23B, the Parliament and the public will finally have a clear, factual picture of how the defective concrete remediation scheme is working and functioning. Homeowners, the Oireachtas and stakeholders will know how many applications are received, validated or referred to the Housing Agency, how long decisions take, which remediation options have increased and the outcome of appeals, which is very important. No one should have to rely on redacted FOIs and ink-covered paper. This amendment would be a great help. Amendment No. 55 would ensure that every decision must be published in anonymised form within 90 days, showing the facts, reasoning and outcomes. Homeowners are trapped in appeals that can last for years, while the Housing Agency hides behind claims of independence. We have the Housing Agency and the Appeals Board passing the buck from one to the other, while both are operating like a secret service with no timelines or transparency. Homeowners deserve to see how these decisions are made. Enough of the secrecy and delay. Families should be able to pursue their lives without stress and uncertainty. Transparency is needed so they can trust the system. Amendment No. 56 is necessary because the Minister must make public how deleterious materials are detected, where problems are occurring and what risks are emerging. Risks are emerging everywhere. We need to make people aware of this. Publishing regional patterns and international comparisons helps to prevent repeated mistakes in the future, allows for early intervention, which is important, and builds trust that the Government and the scheme are operating together. Where we have pockets of pyrite, pyrrhotite and other deleterious materials, we can see it coming and react to it.

I wish to speak in support of these amendments from Deputy Ward. There is no doubt that we need greater oversight of the entire process. I spoke earlier on this issue, and I want to touch on it again. Sadly, we have an utterly deficient standard, IS 465. Basically, we have been diagnosed with the wrong cancer. Mica was not the main contributory factor to the crumbling of homes in Donegal. What has clearly emerged from international peer-reviewed research science, which it is pretty clear the NSAI now accepts, is that it is pyrrhotite and internal sulphate attack. I have to fear that the rush to label it as mica may have been influenced by the wish not to knock down all the houses and to save money, to be crude about it. I remember hearing a member of the panel on a radio station. They explained to the layperson that with pyrite, the house has to come down, but with mica, the house can stay up. I remember it so well. I am a layperson. I am certainly no scientific expert or geologist, but I trusted that. I always use the example that when I get on a plane, I trust the pilot can fly the plane and trust that the mechanics have maintained the plane well. I put my life in their hands, as everybody does. We put an awful lot of trust in experts, but the experts got it badly wrong. That flowed into a tortuous process for homeowners, where their engineers, who had looked at the house extensively, carried out the testing and been on site, said the house had to come down. They were qualified engineers who were on the list. Then there was the situation where the Housing Agency just used a desktop, it seems, looking at IS 465. Its engineers had not even visited the houses. I have already seen some of the decisions of the appeals panel. It is astonishing. Basically, there were engineers who had not gone on site and inspected the house, but had overruled an engineer who had, based on IS 465. When we raised this with the Minister, initially the Department of housing was standing over the Housing Agency. Then, when the emerging evidence became apparent, it said that, no, it was always supposed to be looking at pyrrhotite too. The Housing Agency was left on its own. These amendments are very important. We need to make sure there is oversight and accountability. We also need to know what is emerging and what the experience has been, so we can learn from it. I support the amendments. I want to talk briefly about the appeals, in particular the length of time involved. It is an independent process. Every time we tried to get answers from the Minister, Deputy James Browne, and the previous Minister, it was said to be an independent process. The Housing Agency has an independent process. Donegal County Council has an independent process. People waited for a year. They were already traumatised and then they had this decision. They know it is wrong, but it takes another year. Finally, the appeals panel is starting to deal with this, but it has been so slow. It is agonising. These are important amendments. They are about accountability and making sure that we can see the situation, but also the big picture. We can analyse the emerging data, see what is happening and try to improve things and make them better. They are good amendments, which I support.

Ba mhaith liom tacú leis an leasú seo. Ba cheart go mbeadh an córas iomlán trédhearcach. I support Deputy Ward’s amendments. From a homeowner’s point of view, in Donegal especially, this process has been a never-ending, complex bureaucratic nightmare. One of the key characteristics that exists with this Government is the glacial pace with which it delivers anything. Even when it decides what to do and sets its mind to do it, it is incredibly slow. From a governance point of view, transparency is very important. You cannot manage if you cannot measure. One of the difficulties in this process is the lack of transparency on delivery. Amendment No. 50 introduces full accountability and transparency into a system that has long been opaque by requiring the Minister to produce an annual report on the operations of sections 23A and 23B. The Oireachtas and the public will be able to have a clear, factual picture of how the defective concrete remediation scheme is functioning. If the Minister is allergic to transparency and to measurability, then there is a difficulty. Why would the Minister fear transparency in relation to fixing what is an arduous process that so many people have been forced to go through?

While we are talking about the process, why does it take over nine months for the test results to come back? There is no explanation whatsoever. People are told, month after month, that this is to do with the process of the whole thing. Why does it take so long for the results to come back from the test?

I am not sure that is part of the Bill. I call the Minister of State to respond.

I propose to deal with amendments Nos. 16, 50, 55 and 56 as tabled by Deputy Ward. Amendment No. 16 proposes to replace text in section 5 of the Principal Act. It will require designated local authorities to publish statistics on a quarterly basis under various headings. My Department already maintains and publishes statistics relating to the scheme, updated on a monthly basis on its DCB webpage. Any additional statistics required on foot of amendments contained in this Bill will be considered, where appropriate, and incorporated into the published scheme of statistics going forward. Amendment No. 50 proposes to insert a new section in the Bill that would mandate the production of an annual report into the operation of sections 23A and 23B of the Bill, including various statistics. I am satisfied the reporting requirements contained in the principal Act are adequate as they include the full operation of the Act and amendments brought under the Bill will be encompassed in these reports where required. Furthermore, I have already pointed out my Department publishes monthly statistics pertaining to the grant scheme and the make-up of these statistics will be reviewed and updated where required upon commencement of the amendment Act. This will give real-time information that can easily be accessed online by Deputy Ward and, of course, other stakeholders. Amendment No. 55 proposes to insert a new subsection that mandates the appeals panel to publish certain anonymised information pertaining to the decisions it makes. The appeals panel is already under significant pressure to issue decisions to appellants and mandating further work for it to undertake at this time is counterproductive. Statistics around the work of the appeals panel are under review and, where appropriate, will be published in due course. The appeals panel is statutorily independent of the Department and the Minister. It is a matter for it, in the first instance, regarding the information it provides. I understand it is open to looking at how it communicates its work. The Department stands ready to assist and fund this, if required, including, for example, the use of a bespoke appeals panel website. However, for now I understand the panel is quite rightly concerned about improving the speed at which it can issue decisions to homeowners and is concentrating its efforts on this issue for now. Amendment No. 56 proposes an amendment to mandate the production of an annual report that summarises technical data that may be held by designated local authorities or the Housing Agency. Information of this nature does not relate to the operation of the grant scheme under the principal Act and for this reason I cannot support this amendment. For the reasons set out above, I am unable to accept these amendments.

Amendment No. 17 has been ruled out of order.

I move amendment No. 18: In page 6, between lines 18 and 19, to insert the following: “Amendment of section 8 of Principal Act 5. Section 8 of the Principal Act is amended by the insertion of the following subsection after subsection (2): “(3) Nothing in this Act or any regulations established under it will affect the eligibility of a dwelling that has already been determined to be impacted under I.S. 465:2018, except in cases where fraud or clear error is proven or a non-scientific diagnosis has been given.”.”.

Does the Deputy wish to speak to the amendment?

No.

Amendment No.19 has been ruled out of order.

I move amendment No. 20: In page 7, between lines 3 and 4, to insert the following: “Damage threshold for attached dwellings 7. The Principal Act is amended by the insertion of the following section after section 15: “15A.(1) Where a determination is made under section 15(1)(b) that a relevant dwelling does not meet the damage threshold, the relevant owner may make a notification under subsection (2) where— (a) the relevant dwelling is— (i) terraced or semi-detached, and (ii) connected to another relevant dwelling, (in this section the first-mentioned relevant dwelling is referred to as an ‘attached dwelling’), and (b) the Housing Agency has approved a remediation option and remediation option grant under section 16(4)(a) in relation to the relevant dwelling referred to in paragraph (a)(ii). (2) The relevant owner referred to in subsection (1) may notify the designated local authority that he or she is seeking a determination under section 15(1)(a) that the attached dwelling meets the damage threshold. (3) A notification under subsection (2) shall— (a) be made in such form and manner as may be prescribed, and (b) be accompanied by— (i) such evidence as may be prescribed of the matters referred to in paragraphs (a) and (b) of subsection (1), and (ii) such other documents or information as may be prescribed for the purposes of the notification. (4) The designated local authority shall, having regard to any matters prescribed under subsection (8), consider the notification under subsection (2) and decide— (a) where it is satisfied that the notification is made in accordance with subsection (3), that the Housing Agency shall be deemed to have made a determination under section 15(1)(a) that the attached dwelling meets the damage threshold, or (b) where it is not satisfied that the notification is made in accordance with subsection (3), that the determination of the Housing Agency under section 15(1)(b) in relation to the attached dwelling remains valid. (5) The designated local authority shall, as soon as practicable, notify the relevant owner of the attached dwelling and the Housing Agency of its decision under subsection (4). (6) Where a decision is made under subsection (4)(b), a notification under subsection (5) shall state that the relevant owner of the attached dwelling may appeal the decision in accordance with Part 5 within 90 days of the date of the notification. (7) Where a decision is made under subsection (4)(a), the Housing Agency shall, notwithstanding the criteria prescribed under section 16(10)(c), in so far as is possible, prioritise the assessment and consideration of the application under section 16. (8) The Minister may prescribe the matters to which a designated local authority is to have regard in considering the notification under subsection (2). (9) In this section, ‘damage threshold’ has the meaning given to it by section 15.”.”. I will now speak to amendment No. 20. Amendment No. 20 proposes the insertion of a new section 15A into the principal Act. This new section relates to the conditions certain conjoined dwellings such as semi-detached homes, terraced houses, etc., must meet in order to be eligible for the DCB grant scheme. It provides that where a relevant dwelling has not met the damage threshold for entry to the scheme and is attached to another relevant dwelling that has received a grant determination under the principal Act, the relevant owner of the dwelling that has not met the damage threshold can notify their designated local authority they are seeking a determination that their dwelling is deemed to meet the damage threshold. In effect, it allows them to bypass the damage threshold stage but they are still bound by all other parts of the eligibility assessment process. Where the designated local authority is satisfied, it will notify the Housing Agency of its decision and the Housing Agency will arrange for the assessment and consideration of the application and determine the appropriate grant option and amount for the dwelling. Although the principal Act does not include homeowners who wish to carry out works at the same time to the attached dwelling from doing so, it provides that each dwelling must have met the damage threshold before the application can be passed to the Housing Agency for grant determination. This can result in a delay for the relevant owners of the attached dwellings. This amendment will provide much-needed flexibility and assistance to homeowners of attached dwellings.

This is one of the amendments that was announced after we finally got our hands on the legislation. There was the heads of Bill as presented to the committee on housing and then there were these amendments that were added on. Here is the problem. We have a scheme that tells people they should knock down half of a semi-detached block. We have a scheme that tells you that you should pick out a terraced house out of a row but I will particularly focus on semi-detached units. It really is a minefield for builders. They are very reluctant to do these types of jobs and the prices reflect that. The SCSI costings for a typical semi-detached three or four-bedroom property that was reported back in March 2024, now approaching two years ago, would be a very different price now. Builders can just name what they want. They do not need the work and they do not really want to be doing that work. They have to physically knock down the house very carefully so as not to impact the adjoining house. In some cases, the owners of the adjoining properties are appealing to An Bord Pleanála to try to stop the work. This is a real mess. What is the Minister of State's response to that? It is incremental and minimalist; basically talking about the damage threshold. The fact is there is a whole layer of houses. This goes to the fundamental problems with the scheme. There could be somebody who is a holiday home owner and who is not eligible to take part in the scheme. There could be somebody who has more than one rental property, so this could be property number two, three or four. That is not eligible for the scheme. As these properties are not eligible for the scheme, the Government is forcing one half of the semi-detached block to be knocked down and the other half cannot be because it is not eligible for the scheme. Then, there is the issue of people who just cannot afford to go onto the scheme. They cannot access the money. Because the scheme is not working, we see, in housing estates, half a block being replaced and half staying up. It is just a mess. Rather than just accept this issue of semi-detached dwellings points to the fundamental problems with the conception of the scheme and the injustice of the scheme, what does the Minister of State come up with? A damage threshold, which is the most absolutely minimalist thing that can be done. It will make very little impact. In all of this legislation and amendments that have been presented , this amendment tells me the Government is completely and utterly out of touch with the reality on the ground in our counties. It actually is astonishing that what it came up with as a response to dealing with the mess of knocking down half of these blocks - and we see it all over our constituency - is that if there is one house that is less damaged than the other, we will let both of them go through. That is not the issue. The issue is that there is a whole clatter of houses. As most houses cannot engage with this scheme, they cannot be knocked down because either they are not eligible or the owners cannot afford it so we end up with this. This is just a deeply frustrating amendment and it points to the fact the Minister of State is just not listening. I appreciated Deputy Pat the Cope Gallagher's statement tonight. He is clear this scheme is not working. There are other Government representatives in Donegal who are clear but the problem is that the representatives the Minister of State is listening to are badly advising him. I say again that the Minister of State can ram through this legislation. By the way, it looks like he will reject the amendment. I do not see any evidence that he will accept any amendments. Mark my words: he will be back again in a year and he will be back again in another year. I will talk to both the Minister and the Minister of State when we are older men and they will say I was right that this will come back to haunt them in five years. Maybe their time in politics will be over then but it will come back to haunt those who replace them in time to come. Hopefully, in due course, we will have a government that wakes up and realises 100% redress, delivered directly by the State the same way as the pyrite remediation scheme, is the only way you will take every victim home and give them justice. Frankly, this amendment tells me everything I need to know about how short-sighted they are.

I am not at all clear on what this amendment does and its relevance for a semi-detached dwelling, for example, where one dwelling is deemed to be awarded a grant the other has previously not been. It might be helpful if the Minister were to try and explain in plain English, particularly in a case where you have attached or semi-detached dwellings, what this amendment is trying to do. Obviously, as Deputy Mac Lochlainn outlined, this is a very significant issue. It is one where we have had examples in Mayo, Donegal and elsewhere. For the sake of clarity, if the Minister could talk us through, what are the implications of the proposition for this request for one of the relevant dwellings that does not meet the damage threshold and how does this operate in real time?

I will give the Minister a quick example. I am from a small island off the coast of Ireland, Arranmore Island, and I live in a section of it. Within five minutes of my house was one of my neighbours. He moved to Letterkenny and I moved to the Finn Valley and the two of us had houses. I built my own house; he bought his. His house is semi-detached. He has children trying to go to college. His neighbour has knocked down his house. He is not in a position to get it and he would not meet the damage threshold. I have been up at his house. I put my fist through the wall and it is like an eggshell. When I did that, his wife realised how serious the issue is with them. The damage threshold does not work. Given the orientation of the house, it is protected with walls and trees. There is no weather hitting it but inside that wall that is not cracked is dust, absolute dust. This is what is going to happen. It will become common. Another aspect of it arises when we are building these houses and we are going in and separating them. For example, it costs €310,000 to rebuild a semi-detached house now. With that €310,000, you have separated it out. Another foundation has to be put in. They have had to remove the foundation because they cannot build on sand and they are separated out from the house. The houses of the people who cannot afford to get on the scheme are crumbling down around them and they are left traumatised while these people are trying to move on with their life. What happens with that is there is one house that has been ebuilt for €310,000. The market value is €230,000. Therefore we are doing it in the most expensive way for the Exchequer and we are leaving a family behind. If we did everything together, up and down, with house contractors in, we could do it at an economically valued rate and it would not be costing the Exchequer. The way we are doing every one of these houses is the worst way. As a builder, I would never touch them. I would never go near them because it does not work. A semi-detached house cannot be split, but we did it. Three years ago, the Minister of State, then Minister, Deputy McConalogue, was going around saying that the house that was split in half in Buncrana was an unfortunate error but here we are with 100 unfortunate errors coming down the road. We have to get a common-sense grip of this. The way we are doing this is ridiculous.

It is not at all clear to me what this amendment will do because this is something that I have dealt with in my constituency with one of my constituents whose property is a semi-detached house and the house next door does not meet the damage threshold. I do not even know how the Minister will realistically get builders to do this work. It is incredibly complex. It involves essentially splitting something that in essence cannot be properly split because what is in one block has to be in the adjoining block and the deterioration is going to spread from one to another. It seems with this amendment that the Minister is inching, if I can be generous, in the right direction but it goes nowhere near far enough. Even the idea around the "certain circumstances", in particular, concerns me because we are still going to have many people who will remain excluded from this.

I am glad Deputy Mac Lochlainn referenced the fine Government TDs that we have in Donegal. Deputies Gallagher and McConalogue are speaking to the same constituents the Deputy is speaking to. They are listening, they are hearing them and they represent them. The Opposition does not have a monopoly on how they represent the people of Donegal and those impacted by defective blocks. The Government Deputies would have addressed the fact that there are anomalies and the scheme is too restrictive when it comes to conjoined houses, detached houses and terraced houses. That was something that we were hearing and there was a need to address that. What this amendment does is address that and introduces greater flexibility. Deputy Ward spoke about the damage threshold. This is exactly what this amendment does. It effectively allows us to bypass that damage threshold in certain instances.

Certain.

That is important. It allows flexibility and assistance where it is needed. That is simply what the amendment does.

Deputy Mac Lochlainn first, followed by Deputies Ó Broin and Ward.

I will not get into whether Deputy Gallagher is more in tune with the voters of Donegal than Deputy McConalogue.

Where did the Deputy get that from?

I will not do it but I will let the people have their say in due course on those matters.

I never said that.

The Minister of State did not deal with the issues I raised. Is it a good idea to knock down half a block, to take down half a house when the house next door is equally damaged but that has to stay because that is not eligible for the scheme? That house might be a holiday home. It could be a rental property, more than one or it could be that the person just cannot afford it which is the most common example that we have. Is it okay to force families to knock down half? When you talk to the builders, there is extreme nervousness around this. I will not repeat everything I said. The Minister of State heard what I said. He is an intelligent man. I know the Minister of State and we have dealt with each other over many things over the years. I will ask the Minister of State again. Is it acceptable to force people to knock down half a semi-detached block and leave the other half, that is equally damaged by defective blocks, standing? It makes no sense but that is what the Minister's scheme forces people to do. If the Minister and the Minister of State have time next year, in January, we would be happy to take them around and show them the reality on the ground. They can take Deputies Gallagher and McConalogue so we do not exclude anybody. I am serious about this. Please come. The Minister will force this amendment and all these amendments through tonight. That is how it is going to play out, but I ask him now to come out and look at this issue of semi-detached houses, come and visit some of the houses that we are dealing with in Donegal, Mayo and these counties, and hopefully we can change his mind.

My question is kind of the same as the first time. The Minister of State said this provides greater flexibility and it will effectively allow for the bypassing of that damage threshold. Will the Minister of State try to give us an explanation of how that is going to work? Having read this amendment four or five times, I am not clear. Is the Minister of State saying that if there are two homes side by side and both have applied for inclusion in the scheme, and one has been awarded a grant but the other has not because they have not met the damage threshold, there will now be a mechanism by which they can apply through the local authority or the Housing Agency for the damage threshold to be deemed to have been met when it was not originally and therefore both homes can be remediated? That seems to be what the Minister of State is saying but that is not what I am reading. If that is the case, on what grounds is the Housing Agency going to be able to overturn the original decision not to award a grant for remediation? How flexible will that flexibility be? We need more explanation of how this will actually work in real time rather than just a general statement around flexibility for us to determine how, if at all, this will be helpful for the type of homeowners Deputies Mac Lochlainn and Charles Ward spoke about.

Semi-detached homes are most commonly built sharing the same chimney breast. Unfortunately, I have had to go in with a teleporter to a house that was demolished, seal up the house and basically brick up the house where there was no chimney any more because it had to be taken down. We also had to put in a flue liner for a family friend all before 3 p.m. when the kids got home. The night before, they had to stay in their granny's because the house got tumbled and their room was left exposed. Then, the rodents - the mice - all came in. This is a constant. They are abandoned because they do not have the financial resources. It is being done in the worst way because the majority of semi-detached houses have a shared chimney breast. When you take one away, you expose the house to all the elements and people cannot afford it. I hope the Minister of State will come up to Donegal. All he will see is houses split in half and tarpaulins bolted in with timbers and in behind that are children. They are going to school every day with rodents in the house because they can get in.

Everyone one of the speakers is talking correctly. They have the experience. I have taken out the front of buildings with 300 or 400 tonnes of stone propped over the buildings. For a semi-detached house - it depends on the era it was built in - there could a 6 in. or 9 in. block wall in the middle separating them or there could be a stud wall built up between them with fire-lined boards on both sides. If you open and take down one property, because they were built as one unit, when one side is taken out that weakens the structure of the other side. If the roofs are cut roofs - the same ridge board runs across the top of the roofs - then the rafters are on the same wall plates, which means that if you disturb anything, you weaken it. If a house on one side is defective, the same bloody blocks are on the other side. If you open it to the elements, you make the other house defective. If a house is built as a semi, it is one unit. It is built as a block. If it is a 15-block unit, it should be treated as one unit and all of it should be brought in together. What happens if one house is said to be defective? The proper way of doing any other house is to brace it in case you take away something that may have been supporting the house. You could create something that could put people's lives in danger. Is there anything in the Government regulations to say that if one side of a house is removed and the other side collapses and injures somebody, the Government is responsible? Common sense is not that common. If it is a semi-detached house, it is one unit. It was built as one unit and it should be treated as one unit. If one side is defective, the other side is defective. If it does not meet the threshold, it should be based on the building as a whole. That is where a small bit of common sense comes into it. We need to regulate properly for this. By allowing one house to come down, that could deteriorate the other house faster. I said this at the very start when the Government said the roof had to be kept if there was an existing house. It said that the outer walls should be removed. Then it wanted the outer walls to be replaced and connected to the existing blockwork, which could crumble down the line because it has been opened to the elements. It is a sign of madness. Why does the Government not listen to people in the business, who have solutions and common sense? I know as a contractor that if you have to take down a semi-detached house, the bonding and insurance you will need to have on the second building in order to take down the first building will cost more. It has to cost more because it is a health and safety risk. Someone is being left in a health and safety risk situation. It also concerns the insurance of the person in the second half of the house. Will their insurance cover their house because somebody has removed half of the building and now they have tarpaulin on their end of it? Is their house insured? Under fire regulations or health and safety, is that house insured if a storm comes? That is what we are asking. If it is a semi-detached house, it should be treated as one building.

I want to go back to something Deputy Ó Broin said earlier. It goes to the point I am trying to make. I am dealing with a constituent at the moment who is in a semi-detached house. She has met the damage threshold but the house next door has not. If she can be included in the scheme and the house next door has been told it does not meet the damage threshold, by what mechanism under what is proposed tonight can they access the scheme?

I need clarity before I leave here tonight. I want to be able to tell the people of Lios na Circe and Westport what this means for them. Not only are these semi-detached, detached or terraced houses, but the topography of where they are built means they are sitting on a number of slopes. These houses were built by an approved housing body with the local authority and local authority mortgages. The Minister of State is saying that this amendment is designed to bring flexibility so that if one homeowner applies and they want to rebuild their house and they meet the damage threshold, the other relevant owner can then bypass, if you like, the threshold required or that can be taken into consideration. Is that what the Government is trying to do in order to bring in the flexibility? I am trying to understand. It should be the default position that the relevant house can be done as well at the same time if it is very obvious that it has defective concrete blocks and foundations. The amendment provides that the "owner of the attached dwelling may appeal the decision in accordance with Part 5 within 90 days of the date of the notification". Is the Government really saying there will be cases that will need to be appealed because somebody decides the attached house cannot be done at that particular time? Could the Minister of State clarify that, because I want to know what to tell these people?

I appreciate all the kind invitations to Donegal. It must be the second most beautiful county in the country.

After Dublin.

On a serious note, in fairness, Deputy Ward has lived through this and understands. I certainly do not intend to get into the minutiae and discuss various cases. A plethora of potential situations have been raised by Deputies, but the simple way to explain things is that the amendment attempts to address what we were told was rigidity in the scheme. We were told the old scheme was restrictive when it came to conjoined, terraced and detached houses. The amendment tries to introduce flexibility. We keep hearing about the onus in terms of the damage threshold. This measure effectively provides an opportunity to bypass damage thresholds in the situations in question. I am aware that Deputy Ó Broin has read this amendment a few times. I do not think I can be any clearer in respect of it. What it attempts to do is quite straightforward. I really hope we will have the full support of the House on it.

Without repeating the same argument, it would be helpful if the officials could produce a briefing note on how this is going to work that could be shared with the Oireachtas housing committee, for example. The committee members could share it with their colleagues. I am not at all clear how and against what criteria it will operate. It is clear the Minister is not going to give us that information here. That is fine but even a short briefing note from the officials explaining how they envisage this measure will work in real time would be very helpful and welcome.

We can issue a briefing note.

That is great.

Amendment No. 21 has been ruled out of order.

Amendments Nos. 22 and 46 are related and may be discussed together, by agreement.

I move amendment No. 22: In page 7, line 37, after “withdrawn” to insert the following: "if the applicant fails to comply within 30 days of a written request, and only after a further reminder has been issued and a period of 14 additional days has elapsed". Amendment 22 is vital to protect homeowners who have been unfairly penalised by rigid timelines. It ensures no one can be removed from the scheme without first receiving a clear written request and a full 30-day response period, followed by an additional 14-day grace period after a reminder. Homeowners already face enormous stress and disruption. Under the current arrangements, all pressure falls on them, while the local and national authorities face no accountability regarding delays and administrative failures. Amendment No. 22 puts fairness and common sense first and guarantees that families are treated with dignity and not rushed out of the scheme designed to protect them. Amendment 46 provides protections for ensuring people cannot be removed from the scheme hastily. It guarantees fair process and gives applicants ample time to respond to requests before withdrawals occur, reinforcing timelines that work for homeowners and that are not against them.

I fully support the amendments, but I would like to make a comment on the section before we proceed. We have spent the past three and a half hours dealing with a wide range of deficiencies within the scheme, but section 8 is the substantive element of the legislation. It relates to the application for an increase to the remediation option grant. That is something for which people on this side of the House, particularly those from the impacted counties, have been making the case for quite some time. It is important for us to remember the timeline. Legislation was rushed through the Dáil in the summer of 2022. It took a year for the regulations to be drafted, but the cap was set in the legislation in 2022. People started applying to the new scheme in 2023 and transitioning from the original scheme during that period. A core principle of the scheme was that nobody would be disadvantaged either from transitioning or applying. At the end of 2023 and in early 2024, the then Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, requested the SCSI to conduct an updated assessment of the potential costings. That work, I understand, concluded in March 2024 and some updated work was done until August. The agreement in principle from the Government to introduce this legislation was then agreed. The problem is that the final subsection of section 8 refers to qualifying expenditure. Where somebody applies for the increased grant and that grant is awarded, it can be paid out only on qualifying expenditure, and that, according to the subsection, means "expenditure, in carrying out works to satisfy the approved remediation option, incurred by the relevant owner after the date of the notification referred to in subsection (1)(a), but not earlier than 29 March 2024". Almost everybody on this side of the House tabled amendments to remove that. I fully understand that this places a charge on the State and therefore, under Standing Orders, it is ruled out of order. I anticipated that. However, this is a really crucial section of the legislation and there is simply no justification for the date 29 March 2024 because construction sector inflation started in 2023, featuring through to the end of 2023 and into 2024. The consequence of having this arbitrary date, and it is arbitrary, is that there will be a significant number of homeowners who will have undertaken remediation, or portions thereof, prior to that date, and they will have been paying prices significantly higher than suggested by the original SCSI report that informed the cap in the legislation in 2022. For this reason, many of us on this side of the House simply cannot support this legislation. It is creating another very serious inequality. No affected homeowner should be left behind. Any affected homeowner who has experienced construction-sector inflation since the setting of the cap should be able to avail of this. We teased this out with the Minister’s officials at a meeting of the housing committee and they could not provide any credible justification for why the date was included other than that it was, if I remember correctly, the date on which the SCSI report was concluded. However, that report was considering inflation over a much longer period, from 2023 onwards. I appeal to the Minister to provide in his response either a better justification for the cut-off point than we have received to date or an undertaking that between now and the taking of the Bill in the Seanad, he will revisit this matter and either introduce flexibility or remove the date. Otherwise, the consequence will be that a significant group of homeowners will be significantly out of pocket because the Government is simply not backdating the increased cost as a result of inflation in accordance with an appropriate timeframe.

I support Deputy Ward’s amendments, but I also wish to comment on section 8. I said on Second Stage – the Minister might have heard my contribution – that it is deeply unjust to have a deadline of 29 March. I can guess what the rationale for it was: the publication of the SCSI report. We should remember that the first scheme was discredited and replaced by a second, which I believe was also discredited. That is my opinion and I am not asking the Minister to deal with that. What happened when the first scheme transitioned to the second scheme was that the early starters - the early movers - were not penalised. They were able to avail of the increases in caps and rates as they transferred over to the new scheme. The principle was that early movers would not be punished. We should remember that the cost of building has been increasing continually. The SCSI was requested in 2023 by the then Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, to produce the report. That indicates the period it would have been examining. The report was published in March 2024, but the SCSI would have been considering the facts on the ground from 2023. It is deeply unjust, to have the deadline. What does it mean? I agree with my colleague Deputy Ward on this. He estimates that dozens of families are affected. It is not huge money in the overall scheme of things but it is devastating for those families to be punished for being early movers. The Minister should think about this. I do not need to recite the horror show that these families are going through. They could not wait any longer, so they just got on with it and the fact is they are now being penalised by the introduction of this arbitrary date. I appreciate that the Minister has made a call and I would say that he is not going to accept any amendments but I ask him to please reflect on this when it comes to the Seanad, because this is extremely cruel to dozens of families. It will cost them tens of thousands of euro. We have spoken to those families. I have no doubt but that they are watching this debate tonight. We have talked to them and their children. The maximum amount here is €42,000. That is a lot of money for a working family to have to pay back and beg, borrow and steal. I am asking the Minister to remove that date and to allow those early movers, the same as he did on the previous scheme, not to be punished. I ask him to not punish them for moving early. They could not hold back any longer. If the Minister does not accept it, he should listen to us tonight. He has time to bring amendments when it goes to the Seanad. I ask him to please do that.

I support the amendment from Deputy Ward. I too tabled an amendment about the arbitrary deadline of 29 March. I understand why the amendments were ruled out of order, because they place a charge on the Exchequer but the Minister needs to look at this again because the deadline is arbitrary. It is bad enough that the Government took a year to come up with what is simple legislation to lift the cap. Why did the Minister come up with the date of 29 March? Was it to coincide with the SCSI report? Surely the report would have looked at costings into 2023? This is about money, pure and simple. I ask the Minister to come back when he can bring in amendments in the Seanad and not to exclude dozens of families who desperately need that money because he is penalising people who applied early. They did what the Government asked them to do, which was to apply for the scheme and to get in early. This is cruel and is really creating division where there is not division.

We are talking about a scheme that will cost billions, that is, in excess of €2 billion and maybe €5 billion. To have this arbitrary date to exclude some homeowners is deeply unfair and unequal. I have a situation on one estate where some homeowners on the estate are getting one rate and some owners are getting the other rate. That is grossly unfair. I ask the Minister, as others have said, to revisit this and look at it again. In the context of the whole scheme, we are talking about a pittance here but it is a huge, potentially life-changing amount of money in the difference it makes to single householders. We do not want a situation where one neighbour is pit against another because one gets more or less on a scheme that is not 100% in the first place.

I will give the Minister the figure. Forty-three families were left behind. Deputy Mac Lochlainn and I have dealt with these families. We have had meetings with them where they have come to us and said they did nothing wrong. They moved and were told to do this and this is what they did. They ask why they cannot get their money. There is a difference of a month between them and their neighbours who will get their 10%. It is a multibillion euro scheme and for under €1 million, 43 families, if they were at the top, at the €40,000, would get that amount of money. It would be under €1 million, but they did what was asked, moved forward and have been abandoned. I ask the Minister to look at this because he has the power to change this. Those families were given that word by the previous housing Minister. I believe the Minister, Deputy Browne, can right a wrong here.

In the scheme of things, when you look at projections of what this will cost, it will be 43 houses and roughly €22,000 per house. Given the different-sized houses, it is an average of €22,000 per house. Going by the 29 March deadline, there is a price increase which is between €16 and €20 per square foot, with the inflationary costs that have been caused by different things, including budgetary changes by the Government, the hike in fuel costs, transport costs, rising insulation costs and rising silicone costs. All the different oil-based materials for houses, through different budgets, have created an increase. We are asking for fairness for 43 houses. It is a pittance when looked at in the scheme of it. We are looking at 43 households which have been left behind. The Minister has an opportunity to fix this when it goes to the Seanad. I believe he will look at this. When you work out what it will cost and based on what it is costing for all the houses to be repaired, it will not even come to 1%. For the sake of 43 houses that went early, as they were instructed to, and are now in a situation where they have a deficit because of inflationary costs, the right thing to do is include everyone. The people who entered the scheme early are the ones who started the whole system going, which showed the Government the faults in the system in the first place. Those people have highlighted it and the Government would not have tabled any of these amendments today except that those houses went first and now the Government has realised the problems that were there. They have given the Government the answer that it needs to fix the houses that are there at the moment. Why not include them when they are now helping the Government to fix some of the problems that it faces today? Its own advisers, all the different chartered engineers and so on could not give the information in a timely fashion but it has it from the practical experiences from the 43 houses. The Minister should use that practical experience, should cover those 43 houses and should bring them into the same scheme. Deputies Ward and Ó Broin have been saying it. Everyone here has been saying it and people have been saying it in the right context, that everyone understands. The Minister and I know it is the right thing to do.

I will address amendments Nos. 22 and 46, tabled by Deputy Charles Ward. Amendment No. 22 proposes that a designated local authority should allow 30 days for an applicant to reply to a request for further information from the designated local authority relating to an application for an increase in the remediation option grant. It then requires a designated local authority to issue a reminder after this period has elapsed and allows a further 14 days for the applicant to respond before it considers the application to be withdrawn. Amendment No. 46 proposes the same follow-up period to be given to an application for an updated remediation option grant where the Housing Agency requests additional information. The Bill allows the form and manner for these requests for further information to be set out in regulations. Therefore, the additional requirement is not necessary. In any case, it would place an additional administrative burden on designated local authorities and the Housing Agency in processing applications for an increase in remediation option grants and an updated remediation option grant under the Bill. For those reasons, I cannot accept the amendments. As the Deputies are aware and understand, the date of 29 March 2024 was chosen as it is the same date that my Department received the most recent cost report from Society of Chartered Surveyors of Ireland. This cost report informed the work of the expert group in recommending the increase in scheme cap and rates. That included an additional uplift for the passage of time to when they were applied in October and November 2024. Homeowners who had completed remediation works prior to this stage were provided for in the first set of scheme cap and rates that were informed by the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland 2023 cost report.

The Minister has not explained the reason for the date. Let me just emphasise the chronology here. When Darragh O'Brien rushed through the legislation in 2022, the expectation was it would take some time for the regulations for the revised scheme to be completed. The Minister was crystal clear that he did not want homeowners to wait until the new regulations were introduced and therefore he gave a public commitment that if they proceeded to apply for inclusion in the original scheme, when the regulations for the new scheme became live they could transition to it and they would be no worse off. So, on the word of the Minister and the Government, in 2022 people would have continued to apply under the old scheme. When the new regulations came in in 2023, they would have transitioned onto that scheme. Some of those people would have had works done prior to the date of 29 March 2024. However, those works would have been more expensive because of construction sector inflation from the period of the 2022 legislation. I understand that the Minister received the report in March 2024, but that report was looking at construction sector inflation as it impacted in these counties for a period prior to that report. I cannot remember if the report was commissioned in December 2023, January 2024 or February 2024, but the Society of Chartered Surveyors would have been looking back into 2023 as part of that exercise. It seems to make no sense whatsoever to set a date of when the report was received when it was actually examining construction sector inflation for a period prior to that. I do not know how far back the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland went - if it went back to the setting of the cap in the 2022 Bill or to the opening date of the scheme in 2023. Perhaps the Minister can provide us with the rationale as to why somebody who may have had some works done in February 2024, January 2024 or December 2023 should not be treated in exactly the same way as people at a later stage. It may well be that the inflation impact for them was less than for people after that date and therefore the amount of additional grant uplift they will need will be less; we do not know. However, it seems to be a completely arbitrary proposition that it is the date the Minister received the report. I ask the Minister to explain the rationale for allowing that date to be the date. Does he at least accept that there were inflationary impacts on the prices that people had to pay for works prior to that date from some point in 2023 up to but before 29 March 2024 and therefore people will be left out of pocket because of this deadline?

I support the comments made on this. Given that the previous Minister and Government had essentially encouraged people to apply and they did that in good faith, it seems deeply unfair that they are now being disadvantaged. I think that is unfair and the Minister should explain why that is the situation.

I have already explained this. Homeowners who completed remediation works prior to this date were provided for in the first set of scheme caps and rates. They were informed by the Society of Chartered Surveyors of Ireland 2023 cost report. The updated report was to look forward and not to bring in retrospective elements to that. The rates that applied applied to transitional applicants from the previous scheme, often referred to as the 90:10 scheme, when they transferred across, but the inflationary pieces are to look forward.

Does that mean the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, was wrong when he said what he said? Was he giving misinformation? As far as the 43 families are concerned, they were told by the housing Minister to go and get it done and they would not be left behind. That is what he said. Those were his words. People trusted this and 43 people are now excluded at a cost that would be minimal. It would be fair to pay them.

I will try to follow the logic of what the Minister has said. He knows about the first scheme in 2020 and the second scheme in 2022. When the second scheme came in, the Government did not just look forward, it made sure that the early movers availed of the increased cap. So how on earth can the Minister argue differently now? In 2022 the people who came in through the original scheme were able to avail of the new caps that were introduced in 2022. There is no consistency here. There is no point in us going back and forth tonight; I am not going to convince the Minister. However, he has the opportunity to bring an amendment into the Seanad. I appeal to him, without having a big blazing row back and forth, to please follow the logic of what he did in 2022 when the early movers were not punished. They were dealing with the same prices as the Minister knows. That report was developed through 2023 and into 2024. It is really cruel to leave these families behind. The Minister does not have to accept this tonight. I know that our amendments have been ruled out of order. We are appealing to him that when the Bill goes to the Seanad to make the amendment then and remove this arbitrary deadline. We should not punish early movers. The Minister should stay consistent with the approach his predecessor took in 2022. Flawed as that legislation was, at least it was good that the increased cap was available to those going through the scheme already.

Amendment No. 23 is out of order.

Amendments Nos. 25 and 26 are ruled out of order.

I move amendment No. 27: In page 9, between lines 23 and 24, to insert the following: “(14) Where a designated local authority refuses to recognise an individual as a relevant owner under subsection (4A), the individual shall be entitled to appeal such refusal under Part 5.”. No applicant can be blocked from the scheme without recourse. The amendment gives anyone who is refused to be recognised as a relevant owner a clear right to appeal, protecting families from arbitrary decisions and ensuring they get the support they are entitled to.

I seek clarity. Amendment No. 27 is not clear to me in what it proposes to amend. Section 8 of the Bill contains a new section 17A. This section 17A does not contain a subsection (4A). In the circumstances I cannot accept the amendment.

Amendment No. 28 is ruled out of order.

Under Standing Order 88(3)(b), I propose that the vote be taken by other than electronic means.

The vote will now proceed.

Amendment No. 29, tabled by Deputy Charles Ward, is out of order.

Amendment No.30, tabled by Deputy Sheehan, is out of order.

Amendment No.31, tabled by Deputy Charles Ward, is out of order.

Amendment No. 32, tabled by Deputies Sheehan, Charles Ward, Ó Broin, O'Doherty, McGettigan, Conway-Walsh and Mac Lochlainn, is out of order.

Amendments Nos. 33 and 35 will be discussed together.

I move amendment No. 33: In page 10, to delete lines 19 and 20 and substitute the following: “section 17A(6)(a), the relevant owner may make applications for payment of an increased grant under subsection (1), as justified by circumstances.”. Amendment No. 33 ensures that relevant owners, including the 43 homeowners left behind by the March 2024 cut-off, can apply for an increased grant when circumstances justify it. It guarantees that no eligible homeowner is left behind and that the scheme responds fairly to the needs of affected families. Amendment No. 35 ensures the right of homeowners to transparency and accountability. Any refusal must clearly set out the reasons, reference the exact statutory provisions and detail the evidence and criteria relied upon. Homeowners will no longer be left in the dark or forced to guess why their application was denied. This prevents bad decision-making and ensures the process is fair, predictable, and legally robust.

Amendment No. 33 proposes to remove the condition that a homeowner may only apply once for payment of an increased grant and this condition is contained in the Bill primarily in recognition of the fact that homes will be remediated under contracts covered by prices set within any 12-month period. It is also placed to reduce the administrative burden on designated local authorities in processing these payments under the Bill and, therefore, it is not necessary to provide for multiple opportunities to submit a claim for payment under this section. Amendment No. 35 proposes a new additional text to the provision in the Bill. The text contained in the Bill clearly states that where designated a local authority refuses to make payment of an increased grant that along with notifying the relevant owner of that decision, it will set out the reasons for the refusal. Therefore, I cannot accept these amendments.

The time permitted for this debate having expired, I am required to put the following question in accordance with an Order of the Dáil of 9 December 2025: "That the amendments set down by the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage and not disposed of are hereby made to the Bill; in respect of each of the sections undisposed of, the section or, as appropriate, the section as ameded, is hereby agreed to in Committee; the Title, as amended, is hereby agreed to in Committee; the Bill, as amended, is accordingly reported to the House; Report Stage is hereby completed and the Bill is hereby passed."