I, too, compliment Deputy Ward, an Teachta Ward, for bringing forward this motion and for all the work he has done since he was elected and before he was elected. I also compliment na daoine in the Gallery, including Councillors Denis McGee and Joy Beard. Indeed, I also compliment the staff of Deputy Ward and the people and families who are affected. How many more times must they make the major journey to Dublin, Baile Átha Cliath, with their plastic bags? They come with knobs of concrete and they are like sawdust. It is quite obvious. The previous Government made efforts, but I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could decide to have a redress scheme for the blocks, mortar and walls, and forget the foundations. I have some experience. I am a plant hire contractor in foundational work and site work and everything else. The foundation is the most important part of anything, including the foundation of the families. This is so distressing to the families who have had to put up with this for so long now. It is distressing that the foundations are not included. It is just pure lunacy. We have standards and regulations, as we have in so many other areas in this country, but they are ignored. We have regulators for everything. They have fancy offices with a brass plate outside, a CEO and staff, but they do nothing. They are toothless, useless and fruitless in my opinion. There are many of them; we appointed another one last week. We appoint them every week and there are thousands of them now. What about the families? It is a noble intention for any person to build their own house and have a house for their family. It is the noblest intention in the world. Now people are forced to replace their homes because of the incompetence and blackguarding of a big company, which has been fined hundreds of millions in Canada, America and all over the world. However, we will not fine it here; not at all. We will put a 5% levy on the ordinary man trying to build a house to pay for this, instead of making the company pay. Everybody knows which one it is. I would be nearly afraid to speak the name, even with privilege. It is CRH. There are different names on the lorries going in and out, but CRH owns the lot because it has a monopoly. It is disgraceful and despicable. I have attended its AGMs here in Dublin a few times, not to cover mica issues but to cover countless other issues where it got away with blatant corruption. This is a shocking case of big business in the pockets of the big parties. I was in a party for long enough and I know how it works. That is the holy all of it. The families are left thrown to the wind. We will have investigations, more reviews and a motion here. It is just pass the parcel. We need to think of the families sleeping in their houses in fear. My daughter, Councillor Máirín McGrath, was in Donegal. Her colleagues up there brought her around and showed her the houses. They showed her housing estates that were empty, gan aon duine ansin. They had to move out. If this happened in Ukraine, we would be talking about it. No doubt we will find hundreds of millions to rebuild Ukraine and there will not be a word about it. There will be no questions asked, no reviews, no tests of the concrete and no anything else, but our own people do not matter. We know that our own families do not matter to this Government. I am not putting this personally to the Minister of State, who I know is a hard-working Minister of State, as is the Minister, Deputy Browne. However, what is going on is just not acceptable. It is time to lay it nakedly out there and support the families who home themselves; they did not ask anybody to home them.

Sentiment score: -0.04