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 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.

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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