Remediation of Dwellings Damaged by the Use of Defective Concrete Blocks (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-10
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Charles Ward (RDR), Donegal

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.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:27+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-10