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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Nessa Cosgrove (LAB), Labour Panel

I move amendment No. 22:
In page 30, between lines 28 and 29, to insert the following:
“Amendment of section 51 of Principal Act
31. Section 51 of the Principal Act is amended by the insertion of the following subsection after subsection (2):
“(3) Without prejudice to subsection (1), on the passing of the Remediation of Dwellings Damaged by the Use of Defective Concrete Blocks (Amendment) Act 2025 the Minister shall commence, and shall within 6 months complete, a review of the need to designate additional local authorities or additional designated local authority areas under section 5 of the Principal Act and, not later than 3 months after the completion of the review, shall make a report to each House of the Oireachtas of his or her findings and conclusions resulting from that review.”.”.
Moving this amendment, I would like to briefly speak about what is not contained in the Bill but should be, that is, an extension of the geographic scope of the scheme. As all Members know, the 2022 Act designated counties Clare, Donegal, Limerick and Mayo and allowed the Government to designate additional counties by order, as occurred in Sligo in 2024. As we heard on Second Stage, the Government will now move to extend the scheme to Fingal and Wexford. That is welcome but it has taken almost four years to get these affected areas on to the scheme.
These piecemeal changes underline the arbitrary, incremental, half-measure approach that runs through so much of this scheme, and both the Act and this Bill. Many of us in the House who have spoken on the Bill know that the western coast from Donegal to Limerick has borne the brunt of the crisis. I, like many of my colleagues, have seen the devastation up close in places like Sligo and Donegal. Equally, we know that these blocks can be found across the country, as the Government is now acknowledging by making the provision for Fingal and Wexford. With the lack of testing to date, it is possible that further cases will emerge over the coming years. The patchy coverage of the scheme risks creating a postcode lottery where those outside predesignated counties will need to fight, campaign and struggle to have their counties added, which has been the case all down the west coast counties already.
This Bill and section could have extended the coverage for the purpose of the scheme to be for the entire State, which makes sense. Why not? It is a simple common-sense approach but, instead, we see more half-hearted, piecemeal changes fiddling at the margins of the scheme that simply do not work. Our amendment would require the Government to face it head on and look properly and carefully at the implications of extending the geographical scope of the scheme to include the entire country.

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Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-16