Defective Concrete Blocks Social Homes Scheme 2026: Motion Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Conor Sheehan (LAB), Limerick City The Labour Party will not stand in the Minister's way with regard to what he is doing here. The basic principle of what he is trying to do is welcome, in terms of extending this to social homes. The issue I have, as has been alluded to throughout the debate, is with the actual scheme itself. We know that more than 2,400 social homes are estimated to have been affected by defective concrete blocks. This is an important step, but the issue I have is with the scheme itself, because it is fundamentally defective. It is a yellow-pack scheme. It is slow, bureaucratic and not 100% redress. My concern here is that we are going to have a situation where AHBs and councils are going to be left with significant funding gaps. That is something the Minister is going to have to address. We have the issue, again, of foundations and foundation costs. The whole idea of potentially forcing a local authority to rebuild or repair a social home on top of a potentially defective, cracked foundation and transferring all that risk onto public infrastructure makes absolutely no sense. In the long term, that represents poor value and something that could potentially come back to haunt the State. I was reading the other day that Donegal County Council was saying it could cost up to €100 million to test, repair and replace the cracked or compromised foundations of 2,400 social homes. We also have the issue of construction costs and the fact that these are based on information that is now a number of years out of date. We know we have since had inflation, instability and war in the Middle East. The issue I have here, and it goes back to what I was saying about the specifics of the scheme, is that the Minister's Department needs to find a way to guarantee that rent-paying council and AHB tenants will not be trapped for the medium to longer term in crumbling, unsafe housing schemes. Additionally, when we are talking about this motion here tonight, we need to be aware and cognisant of the lessons learned from the experience of the private scheme. We are all, I think, aware of the problems we have seen there. I am concerned that we could be just transferring those problems onto social tenants. Why has this taken so long? I ask this because since the initial scheme was introduced three years ago, we have seen a piecemeal approach to tweaking, plugging gaps and addressing issues, and progress has been slow and painful. While, in many ways, the Government is inching in the right direction, it is not moving anywhere near what is actually needed, which is an end-to-end scheme based on the model of the Fingal pyrite scheme. The Government can inch towards it and chip away at this and that, but we will be here twice a year, every year, for eternity, although, please God, I will not be here that long, and we still will not have a scheme that will be fit for purpose. If we look at the figures at the end of August for the private scheme, 604 homes had completed remediation. That is a fraction of the true level of need, and it is an indictment of where the scheme is going wrong. I also have concerns about whether councils and approved housing bodies will have the funding and the staffing required, as well as the capacity and expertise to administer the workload that they will be required to carry out under this scheme. If we are talking about 2,400 homes, it is really incumbent on the Government and the Department to make sure that local authorities have the resources to do it properly. The fundamental issue remains with the scheme. The fact of the matter is that the scheme leaves families, and in this case, local authorities as well, carrying the can for the financial and structural risk incurred because homes were built using defective concrete through failures in regulation and failures in oversight. Local authorities and AHBs are worried that this scheme will leave them to try to carry the can for another mess, one they did not make, and that they will be underfunded in trying to clear the mess up. If that happens, we are going to have social home tenants left in unsafe housing that they fear will fall down around them. It is not acceptable that anyone in a defective home, built using material that they were conned into believing was of an appropriate, safe standard, should be left with their home falling down around them. The fundamental issue with both the private and the social schemes is that a fully funded way of rebuilding unsafe homes in a timely and effective manner is not provided. I am not going to vote against what the Government is doing tonight because I believe it is better than what it is not doing at the moment. However, I have a number of concerns, as I have outlined, and I am very reluctant to stand here and endorse what is being done because I believe that the scheme, as it stands, is fundamentally defective. We need a system that guarantees genuine end-to-end redress, gives tenants and homeowners confidence that their homes are safe and does not force traumatised families and communities to keep coming up here, banging on the door and campaigning for their homes to be made safe. We have been here before and we will be here again. We need assurances that the resources, safeguards and ambition required to deliver on this scheme will be put in place. --- 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/2026-09-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-23