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

The Minister has not explained the reason for the date. Let me just emphasise the chronology here. When Darragh O'Brien rushed through the legislation in 2022, the expectation was it would take some time for the regulations for the revised scheme to be completed. The Minister was crystal clear that he did not want homeowners to wait until the new regulations were introduced and therefore he gave a public commitment that if they proceeded to apply for inclusion in the original scheme, when the regulations for the new scheme became live they could transition to it and they would be no worse off. So, on the word of the Minister and the Government, in 2022 people would have continued to apply under the old scheme. When the new regulations came in in 2023, they would have transitioned onto that scheme. Some of those people would have had works done prior to the date of 29 March 2024. However, those works would have been more expensive because of construction sector inflation from the period of the 2022 legislation.
I understand that the Minister received the report in March 2024, but that report was looking at construction sector inflation as it impacted in these counties for a period prior to that report. I cannot remember if the report was commissioned in December 2023, January 2024 or February 2024, but the Society of Chartered Surveyors would have been looking back into 2023 as part of that exercise. It seems to make no sense whatsoever to set a date of when the report was received when it was actually examining construction sector inflation for a period prior to that. I do not know how far back the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland went - if it went back to the setting of the cap in the 2022 Bill or to the opening date of the scheme in 2023.
Perhaps the Minister can provide us with the rationale as to why somebody who may have had some works done in February 2024, January 2024 or December 2023 should not be treated in exactly the same way as people at a later stage. It may well be that the inflation impact for them was less than for people after that date and therefore the amount of additional grant uplift they will need will be less; we do not know. However, it seems to be a completely arbitrary proposition that it is the date the Minister received the report. I ask the Minister to explain the rationale for allowing that date to be the date. Does he at least accept that there were inflationary impacts on the prices that people had to pay for works prior to that date from some point in 2023 up to but before 29 March 2024 and therefore people will be left out of pocket because of this deadline?

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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