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 I support Deputy Ward’s amendments, but I also wish to comment on section 8. I said on Second Stage – the Minister might have heard my contribution – that it is deeply unjust to have a deadline of 29 March. I can guess what the rationale for it was: the publication of the SCSI report. We should remember that the first scheme was discredited and replaced by a second, which I believe was also discredited. That is my opinion and I am not asking the Minister to deal with that. What happened when the first scheme transitioned to the second scheme was that the early starters - the early movers - were not penalised. They were able to avail of the increases in caps and rates as they transferred over to the new scheme. The principle was that early movers would not be punished. We should remember that the cost of building has been increasing continually. The SCSI was requested in 2023 by the then Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, to produce the report. That indicates the period it would have been examining. The report was published in March 2024, but the SCSI would have been considering the facts on the ground from 2023. It is deeply unjust, to have the deadline. What does it mean? I agree with my colleague Deputy Ward on this. He estimates that dozens of families are affected. It is not huge money in the overall scheme of things but it is devastating for those families to be punished for being early movers. The Minister should think about this. I do not need to recite the horror show that these families are going through. They could not wait any longer, so they just got on with it and the fact is they are now being penalised by the introduction of this arbitrary date. I appreciate that the Minister has made a call and I would say that he is not going to accept any amendments but I ask him to please reflect on this when it comes to the Seanad, because this is extremely cruel to dozens of families. It will cost them tens of thousands of euro. We have spoken to those families. I have no doubt but that they are watching this debate tonight. We have talked to them and their children. The maximum amount here is €42,000. That is a lot of money for a working family to have to pay back and beg, borrow and steal. I am asking the Minister to remove that date and to allow those early movers, the same as he did on the previous scheme, not to be punished. I ask him to not punish them for moving early. They could not hold back any longer. If the Minister does not accept it, he should listen to us tonight. He has time to bring amendments when it goes to the Seanad. I ask him to please do that. --- 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