Hear, hear.

Sentiment score: 0.00

I stand today not only as a TD, but as someone who is directly affected by this. This is a Government-created situation. It happened because of a lack of checks on quarries. If this had been done properly, we would not be facing this situation. I speak with the anger of a father who has watched his home crumble. I speak with the frustration of the people who contact me every day and who cannot take one more sleepless night worrying whether the Bison slab over their heads will come down and injure or kill their children. This is happening. Every day we are contacted. I acknowledge that there is small progress in this Bill, but I cannot pretend it is nearly enough. Progress is limited. Some families will finally receive a retrospective payment. I recognise that and it is needed, but let us be honest; it is a drop in the ocean in terms of what we need. This amendment Bill does not fix the scheme. It does not address the most dangerous failures. It does not protect the most vulnerable. It does not stop the trauma or injustice. A few administrative tweaks cannot disguise the fact the scheme is fundamentally broken. The State allowed defective material to enter the market and families are paying the price. Applications are not progress. They are evidence of a crisis. The Government boasts about 3,000 applications as though it were proof of success, but proof it is not. People are afraid to apply to the scheme because they simply cannot afford it. Their homes are falling apart. They are terrified because they are currently out of options. Applications do not equal safe homes, structural repairs or justice. The truth is that the scheme is dysfunctional. Even those who are accepted onto it are stuck with hundreds of thousands of euro of debt. The reality on the ground is unsafe homes and unsafe lives. Hundreds of families live in homes in which the external leaf has collapsed. They are told, unbelievably, that this is safe. They sleep under Bison slabs, as I said earlier, and watch as the cracks appear, get bigger and the wall that was once there turns into powder. This is not success; this is neglect. Partial remediation is a complete failure and cannot be considered. Government TDs repeatedly described this as the biggest scheme in the history of the State, but just over 200 applicants have completed it and most of them got partial remediation and will have to be revisited in the future at great expense to the Exchequer. Partial remediation is fiscally irresponsible. It is a political cover-up. The State knows this and continues it anyway. This is not redress. It is as simple as that. It is a grant scheme. Let us call it what it is, a grant scheme. It is not 100% redress. We can call a grant full expenditure coverage, but if caps, exclusions, callbacks and hidden costs leave families tens of thousands of euro in debt, it is not redress. Vulnerable families and people are forced to become project managers, find contractors, navigate the costs and engineering disputes and manage dangerous sites. It is simply not redress. Science has moved on, but the scheme has not. The Government continues to hide behind IS 465, a standard that does not reflect scientific consensus. It misidentifies the root cause of the damage and leads engineers to recommend partial remediation, which we will have to come back to at a later date. The Geological Survey of Ireland has confirmed the crisis is primarily due to internal sulfate attack, not mica. Mica is not the issue here, but the State continues to train engineers on a outdated standard. Even Engineers Ireland, through its director general, told an Oireachtas committee that IS 465 is simply not fit for purpose. The Housing Agency still instructs engineers to follow it. This is not a mistake; this is a choice to ignore the science because acknowledging it would force the Government to admit the truth, which is that the only thing we can get out of this is full demolition. That is what is required when an iron sulfate attack is happening in a building. It is a terminal decline in a building. The technical review is simply a farce. The Government tells families who have been wrongly assigned partial remediation that they can request a technical review. It is a bad joke. It is an insult. It is like sending a surgeon to perform heart surgery with a textbook from the 1970s, him botching the operation and then telling the patient to apply for a technical review. It is crazy stuff. The burden is again entirely on the homeowner, who must prove the State was wrong and again wait months or years. The scheme is self-protective, but not homeowner-protective. The appeals system is independent in name only. The Government claims the appeals panel is independent but section 39(10)(b) of the Act states: the Appeal Board shall— [...] (i) direct ... the Housing Agency ... to reconsider its decision ..., or (ii) replace the decision [itself] That does not sound like independence to me. In reality, the board never replaces the decision. Every appeal is pushed straight back to the Housing Agency, the same flawed logic appears again and homeowners wait months and years for the same outcome. This is not independence; this is a closed loop designed to protect the agency from accountability. Let me say this clearly: when I raised concerns, the chair of the Housing Agency wrote to me and accused me of interference. For doing my job by representing my constituents, I was interfering - No. A more absurd, dysfunctional system could not be designed and, as I have said previously, the human costs of this scheme have been proven by research. It is not absurd. It is not decisions. These decisions are destroying lives. Research by Karen Kirby and Oisin Keenan of Ulster University into cases of structural collapses, uncertainty and prolonged displacement shows higher rates of depression in families, chronic anxiety, inability to maintain one's life and go to work, increased risk of suicide, severe emotional harm to children and long-term PTSD-type symptoms. A constituent told me recently: Every time the wind shakes the house, my heart stops. I lie awake wondering if tonight is the night the walls will come down. I do not feel safe. I feel unsafe to close my eyes. Every time I close my eyes and the wind hits against the house, I am worried that the house will come down. I look across at my children and I do not know what to do. I get these kinds of messages every day, as do my colleagues. We all can understand what is going on. Pre-legislative scrutiny was waived for a reason. It exists to prevent bad law, force transparency, ensure accountability and allow TDs, especially Opposition TDs, to propose improvements before the Bill is locked down. The Government needed the scrutiny to be waived because it would have exposed the flaws, scientific inaccuracies and human consequences of this. The Government delayed sending the draft Bill to the housing committee for five months. It was finally circulated late on Friday evening. We had an online meeting on Monday with almost no notice. There was no time to review the draft, consult the stakeholders or prepare. Members were asked to vote by email and waive scrutiny privately with no transparency. This was deliberate. It was manipulation and it was a calculated effort to silence meaningful debate. Then, late last night another insult came. The Bill was meant to come out but it did not come out until 10 a.m. today. That was when we got a look at it. The tactic is to force TDs who cannot consult or get proper amendments done in time. We cannot analyse the way forward. We cannot prepare amendments with proper time when we are left with this and that exposes the weakness this scheme has caused. It is truly meant to be the biggest scheme in the State and handled with maximum transparency but it is not. Instead, it is handled with maximum secrecy. The pyrite remediation scheme is a blueprint deliberately ignored. The pyrite scheme worked because it delivered full State-led remediation. It covered all the cost. It provided accommodation, side-by-side building, an end-to-end scheme, clear scientific standards and an independent body that replaced decisions and did not recycle them. I have constituents and family members in Mayo and Dublin as part of two families who went through this. In Mayo, they have pyrite. They had pyrite in Dublin. The people in Dublin got 100% redress. The sister in Mayo did not. They are citizens of this country; they are treated differently. She asked me why she was getting treated like a second-class citizen. I told her that I could not answer her because that is the Government. There are two schemes in place where family members with one in Dublin who got 100% redress, and they got nothing in Mayo. Why do homeowners in the west and north west not deserve the same rights? It is the same fairness, clarity and protection. It is unequal treatment and it is unconstitutional. The advice given to the Attorney General was that using the existing model would be too expensive. It is not included in this Bill. In his press release, the Minister said that it would include side by sides. The Minister has addressed that today, late on, with the press release at 3.30 p.m. I understand that is coming and that is most welcome. We have to try to prevent homelessness. We have to protect the elderly and disabled. We have to allow families to stay near schools, jobs and their support networks. It is essential going forward to reduce the mental health epidemic that is coming and the tsunami of homelessness. We need to speed up construction times. The Government refuses to allow developers to build entire estates overnight, but we need to get thinking quickly. Tens of thousands of houses in Donegal are going to be falling down around us in the next five to ten years. We need to act on this. The Bill does not provide upfront payments. Homeowners cannot front €40,000 to €100,000. Many of the homes are structurally unsafe and financially worthless. If we could put in an upfront payment, we could get people up and going and get this moving fast, but we cannot at the moment, to reduce the administrative costs to ensure fairness to low-income families who are trapped, but the Government refuses this because upfront payments would demonstrate the true scale of the crisis, which is 20,000 plus at the bare minimum. I hate to say this because it breaks my heart to see this in all our constituencies from Donegal to Mayo, Limerick, Clare, Sligo and everywhere in between, it is coming. We know it is coming. The scheme forces vulnerable people to be builders, quantity surveyors, engineers and project managers. Unlike the pyrite scheme, homeowners must organise demolition, secure contractors, manage site safety, complete paperwork, prefund the works themselves, negotiate disputes and handle inspections. For people with disabilities, pensioners, single parents and people in crisis, this is not redress; this is simple abandonment. They do not have the skill level to do it. It takes a certain skill level to be a builder or contractor. As Deputy O'Donoghue will tell the Minister, it is a skill level that not a lot of people have. I have it; the Deputy has it. I have done this before. I know what it takes to build a house, and it is a skill beyond most people. The Bill needs to be amended. Partial remediation costs more in the long run. Repeat appeals drain resources. Training engineers and outsourcing science is simply wasteful. The Housing Agency's mismanagement is an increasing liability. Legal exposure is growing, which I keep on saying. There is mishandling of this whole scheme. There are breaches in human rights, such as Articles 40 and 43. There are breaches in the EU Charter and the equality under the law. The longer this goes on, the more it is going to cost, not less. We have a Government that claims the opposite of what is happening on the ground. It is so frustrating. It has many claims that this scheme has worked, but it has not. This crisis is catastrophic and is not going to go away. A total of 100% grant coverage is false. There are caps, exclusions of families and tens of thousands have been left short. Independent appeals are false. Appeals are recycled back to the Housing Agency. The Government says: "We are following the science" which is false. IS 465 is outdated and contradicted by geological surveys. It is simply not fit for purpose and we have been told this time and time again. We need to start following the science. The Government has said this is the biggest scheme in the State. Why is it handled with secrecy, last minute drafts, hidden votes and rushed legislation? We need a clear, purposed and straight talking way of going forward where the truth has to prevail. People have to be held accountable that have let this happen to us. The Bill does not fix the scheme. It does not deliver justice. It is does not meet scientific standards. It does not provide equality, it does not provide full redress, it does not prevent legal challenge and it does address the core value. The Government had opportunity and chose to minimise it. Families do not need spin; they need safety, they need certainty, they need equality, they need truth and they need homes. I will continue to fight for the homes and for the families. I have an example of my own life and what is going on with me. I went out on Saturday night with my son. I had a GoPro on my head recording as we put up the Christmas lights, a memory that he can have for the rest of his life. I stood up on a ladder, looked in and saw the cracks on the wall. When I peered in, there was wall no left. That child was there underneath me and he sleeps in the room where I covered that up. I am asking and demanding the Minister to do this, and help the people all over Donegal, Mayo, Limerick, Clare and anywhere that says that we need to address this and we need to do it now. Time is running out. We do not have another 14 years. We have been here for 14 years. It is time we acted, and it is time we acted now.

Sentiment score: -0.07