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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Conor Sheehan (LAB), Limerick City

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.

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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