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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Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West

I fully support the amendments, but I would like to make a comment on the section before we proceed. We have spent the past three and a half hours dealing with a wide range of deficiencies within the scheme, but section 8 is the substantive element of the legislation. It relates to the application for an increase to the remediation option grant. That is something for which people on this side of the House, particularly those from the impacted counties, have been making the case for quite some time.
It is important for us to remember the timeline. Legislation was rushed through the Dáil in the summer of 2022. It took a year for the regulations to be drafted, but the cap was set in the legislation in 2022. People started applying to the new scheme in 2023 and transitioning from the original scheme during that period. A core principle of the scheme was that nobody would be disadvantaged either from transitioning or applying. At the end of 2023 and in early 2024, the then Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, requested the SCSI to conduct an updated assessment of the potential costings. That work, I understand, concluded in March 2024 and some updated work was done until August. The agreement in principle from the Government to introduce this legislation was then agreed.
The problem is that the final subsection of section 8 refers to qualifying expenditure. Where somebody applies for the increased grant and that grant is awarded, it can be paid out only on qualifying expenditure, and that, according to the subsection, means "expenditure, in carrying out works to satisfy the approved remediation option, incurred by the relevant owner after the date of the notification referred to in subsection (1)(a), but not earlier than 29 March 2024". Almost everybody on this side of the House tabled amendments to remove that. I fully understand that this places a charge on the State and therefore, under Standing Orders, it is ruled out of order. I anticipated that. However, this is a really crucial section of the legislation and there is simply no justification for the date 29 March 2024 because construction sector inflation started in 2023, featuring through to the end of 2023 and into 2024. The consequence of having this arbitrary date, and it is arbitrary, is that there will be a significant number of homeowners who will have undertaken remediation, or portions thereof, prior to that date, and they will have been paying prices significantly higher than suggested by the original SCSI report that informed the cap in the legislation in 2022.
For this reason, many of us on this side of the House simply cannot support this legislation. It is creating another very serious inequality. No affected homeowner should be left behind. Any affected homeowner who has experienced construction-sector inflation since the setting of the cap should be able to avail of this. We teased this out with the Minister’s officials at a meeting of the housing committee and they could not provide any credible justification for why the date was included other than that it was, if I remember correctly, the date on which the SCSI report was concluded. However, that report was considering inflation over a much longer period, from 2023 onwards.
I appeal to the Minister to provide in his response either a better justification for the cut-off point than we have received to date or an undertaking that between now and the taking of the Bill in the Seanad, he will revisit this matter and either introduce flexibility or remove the date. Otherwise, the consequence will be that a significant group of homeowners will be significantly out of pocket because the Government is simply not backdating the increased cost as a result of inflation in accordance with an appropriate timeframe.

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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