Defective Building Materials
Dail Éireann — 2025-05-14
============================================================

Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (SF), Donegal

Last year, the then Government finally announced an increase in the cap. This was in line with the recommendations of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, which examined the real costings on the ground. The reality is that the Government did not apply that to people who are going through the scheme already; it was only for new entrants. That was cruel. The Government made it clear that it was going to amend the legislation to sort this out. I appealed to the Government to do that before the election. I stood in front of the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste separately and appealed to them to bring in the amendments. We would make time and it could be done. I feared that this would happen. Unfortunately, I have been proven right. We are now sitting in May and there is no sign of this amendment to the legislation. It is straightforward. I raised this directly with the Minister, Deputy James Browne, who was in County Donegal in recent days. I made it clear to not talk about ten Stages of legislation. We in opposition will do everything to get this through. No pre-legislative scrutiny will be required if the Government honours what it said it was going to do last year, which was to make this increase in the cap available to everybody who is currently going through the scheme. This is really cruel. People are struggling with the €40,000, €50,000, €60,000, €70,000 or €80,000-plus that they must find themselves. They do not have the money to make the final payments to pay the builders. This is urgent. It has been urgent since late last year. I appeal to the Government to bring this through as soon as possible. It should be brought through next week. It will be facilitated by the Opposition in every way. We will do everything we can to make it happen next week in the Dáil and the Seanad; there is no excuse. This is a simple straightforward amendment to the legislation. It should have been done late last year. It needs to be done now.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-05-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-05-14