Remediation of Dwellings Damaged by the Use of Defective Concrete Blocks (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-11 ============================================================ Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel I welcome the Minister. This legislation has been a long time coming, and while we stand here and speak about it this evening, there are families across the west and north west who are still living in houses that are cracking and crumbling and, in some cases, genuinely unsafe to live in. I have sat in kitchens in west Limerick, Askeaton and Abbeyfeale and listened to families tell me the same stories as my colleagues in counties Donegal, Sligo, Clare and Mayo. They have heard of people who did nothing wrong but who are now living in fear of the next Met Éireann warning and thinking to themselves if this will be the night the walls will move and shift again. I remember the day in 2022 when the original legislation was rammed through. The homeowners in the Public Gallery of the Dáil were absolutely traumatised. They had engaged with the State in good faith, and they were betrayed. The betrayal has echoed all the way from Donegal to Mayo to Clare and Limerick. The truth of it is that we have created a first-class and second-class system for our citizens in this State. When the defective blocks happened to be in Dublin or Leinster, the pyrite remediation scheme delivered genuine 100% redress, done directly by the State with no haggling with contractors, no labyrinth of paperwork and no forced debt. If people live in Donegal, Mayo, Clare, Sligo and many other counties, however, the message has been that they can have redress, but only some of it; their home will be rebuilt, but they will have to find tens of thousands of euro to support that building; their suffering is acknowledged, but it is not fully recognised. This is not equality, it is not fairness, and it is certainly not 100% redress. I have met families who are stretched to breaking point - young couples, older couples, people who built their homes with local tradesmen and pride. They are being told that their house must be demolished. They must take out loans they cannot afford or downsize the home in which they raised their children. The Government had the power to fix the caps immediately when the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, SCSI, reported in March 2024. Instead, we waited month after month, watching costs rise while hope fell. Now, we get a chance, and we see it is still incremental, exclusionary and grossly unfair. The Government expects people to accept an arbitrary cut-off date of 29 March 2024. How can that be justified? How can it tell families in Limerick, Clare, Mayo, Donegal and Sligo who moved early, followed the rules and put their trust in this process that they are now too early to be treated fairly? Minister after Minister told us and told homeowners that nobody would be left behind, but here we are. Families are being left behind. Social housing is being left behind. Schools, childcare centres and community buildings with defective blocks are being left behind. Some people in Limerick have been waiting eight or nine months. I received an email from somebody just this week telling me that the core samples were taken in March of this year, and they still do not have that report back. How can that be acceptable? Where are the guarantees that the blocks coming out of the quarries today are actually up to standard and safe? Where is the urgency in this? Where is the actual humanity in all of this? This scheme has left people in the State in a state of ongoing trauma. They are people whose only mistake was trusting that the blocks they were sold were sound, and that the State would stand by them if they were not. We cannot continue with half-measures, arbitrary dates or rhetoric that pretends 100% redress is coming when it absolutely is not. The people of Limerick and so many counties in this country, like those affected in every county, demand equality, not charity. They deserve what those in Dublin received: a true State-delivered 100% redress scheme without hidden costs, without forced debt and without discrimination. No family should be told to find €50,000 or €60,000, and in some cases more, that they simply do not have. No homeowner should be punished for entering a scheme too early. No social housing tenant should have to pay rent on a house that is actually falling apart around them. Families are not asking for anything, just fairness. It is time to deliver on that fairness and 100% redress. --- 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/seanad/2025-12-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:27+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-11