Remediation of Dwellings Damaged by the Use of Defective Concrete Blocks (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2025-12-10 ============================================================ Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (SF), Donegal 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. --- 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/2025-12-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:27+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-10