Remediation of Dwellings Damaged by the Use of Defective Concrete Blocks (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-16
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Victor Boyhan (IND), Agricultural Panel

I fully support Senator Black and her work on all of these amendments. At the end of the day, we are very familiar with the term 100% redress. That is what people are entitled to. This defective concrete block system results from the light-touch regulation of successive Governments going back a long time. Innocent people who set out to realise their ambition to provide a home for themselves in the county they love and want to work and live in have found themselves in this situation. I cannot support anything that dilutes or waters down 100% redress to people who should be entitled to it. It is as simple as that. I am not going to spend time on it because I know the Minister is under pressure - we are under pressure too; we have a lot of business to do and there are many things on the political agenda for a lot of people here tonight - but at the end of the day people set out to do the noble thing, that is, to provide themselves with a home, to go into debt to build a home or pay a developer, builder or construction company to build a home, and those people now find that part or all of their home is crumbling. We have to step in because it would not have happened if we had proper regulation in place. Anything less than that is unfair. We saw the political consequences of it. We saw the shift of support to different political groupings, including the four 100% Redress councillors and the one 100% Redress TD. We also saw the shift in the dynamic of the main political parties, particularly in Donegal but also in Mayo and other places. I am not going to labour the point because the people who know about it are clued in. They have the lived experience. It is really important and I support what Senator Black is trying to do.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-12-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-16