I thank Deputy Ward for tabling this important motion and for his diligent attention to detail on this issue. It is about making sure the Government cannot get away with just burying the issue and saying it is now dealt with - it is definitely not dealt with. This has fundamentally been the approach of the past number of Governments in terms of trying to bury this from the very start of the scandal. The campaign started in 2011. Affected households were fobbed off for nearly ten years, forced to campaign strongly, forced to protest and forced to organise in an extremely impressive way that put huge pressure on the Government before finally getting a remediation scheme that may turn out to be based on faulty scientific evidence. I pay tribute to the campaigners who got us to this point and who continue to push. I thank them for their generosity with their time and solidarity in assisting us when we were getting the campaign of redress for those affected by apartment and duplex defects off the ground. They had plenty of things on their plate but were willing to come to big meetings and small meetings to talk about their experience and how a campaign could be built on an issue that fundamentally has the same foundations, in the sense of a lax approach to regulation by the Government and various corporate operators operating like cowboys to maximise profit at the expense of ordinary householders. The problem is the remediation scheme we now have may be based on faulty scientific evidence. We heard from Deputy Ward how IS 465:2026 may not stand the test of time. It acknowledges that itself by admitting there is uncertainty about the scientific evidence. That uncertainty might not be anyone's fault but it is certainly not the fault of affected households. We know that for a fact. That has to be the guiding principle in this. None of this is the fault of affected households. They should not be the ones to suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, they have been the only ones to suffer any real consequences to this point. Pending the outcome of legal cases, it is not clear Donegal County Council, the National Standards Authority of Ireland or the block suppliers and quarry operators will be made to pay. Cassidy Brothers Concrete Products Limited, Cassidy Brothers Topmix Limited and Cranford Concrete Products Limited are all being taken to court by affected households. The scale of the scandal remains huge. We heard a lot of scientific evidence and detail in the briefing organised by Deputy Charles Ward and the 100% Redress Party yesterday but I have to say the thing that stuck with me most was the evidence suggesting that we are not even at the middle of this scandal yet; we are only in the early phase of this scandal. The broad public outside the counties which have the most affected households up to this point would be shocked to realise that we are only at the start of this process. I think the Government may be shocked to realise this but the evidence presented was very strong. The latest scientific evidence is that 20,000 houses in estates in Donegal, Mayo, Clare and Limerick are affected. That does not include one-off housing, which we know there is a lot of in those counties, social housing, business premises or community buildings. We also know that defective concrete is not confined to those four counties and that it is a problem in other counties as well but we do not have sight of the sort of numbers that would be involved there. The 20,000 households is not the whole picture but only part of it. The central problem with IS 465:2026 is that it allows the retention of concrete foundations in certain circumstances - circumstances that may turn out to be based on faulty scientific assumptions. The evidence presented yesterday was absolutely compelling. Geoscientists Professor Paul Dunlop and Dr. Chris Brough told us about sulphide oxidation, internal sulphate attack, long-term deterioration mechanisms in defective concrete that can affect retained foundations. That is a huge problem because the foundation of your house is exactly that. It is the foundation upon which everything else rests. If the foundation is faulty then your whole house, your whole home and your whole life is insecure - you are literally resting on faulty foundations. No matter what happens above ground, if your foundations are faulty you have a very big problem. Imagine the psychological impact of that for a moment. We have all seen the pictures and heard the stories and you can talk to Deputy Charles Ward about the reality of living in such a house. You have gone through the heartache of your home falling apart and potentially the massive stress of campaigning to fight for some sort of justice for yourself, your family and your local community, you have gone through the hassle of applying for remediation and the disruption of having the house substantially rebuilt and now it could turn out that the foundation is still faulty. In a worst-case scenario the whole thing may need to be demolished and rebuilt again. That is an unthinkable prospect for people. It is enough to drive anyone over the edge. Even if demolition is not needed in future, the fact that uncertainty remains about the long-term durability of the foundation creates massive issues for homeowners. Their remediated house is still not the same as another house. If there is still a bad smell around it for prospective buyers, banks and insurance companies, they may face difficulties remortgaging or if they need to sell for whatever reason – if they need to move somewhere else in the country or out of the country or any other reason – they simply cannot sell their house and so they are stuck with this. To add insult to injury, all this can then be passed on to their children after they die, turning what has been a nightmare for one generation into a nightmare for the next. It is an inter-generational nightmare for which responsibility fundamentally rests with the State and the various companies. The underlying issue underpinning all this is that the State is still refusing to take full responsibility for this crisis even though it was the State that created the flawed standards and failed to police them and that came up with flawed remediation schemes which we were warned about at the time. Let us remember this is not just glorious informed hindsight but we had some of these arguments at the time. None of this is the fault of the homeowners yet they are still paying for this every single day. We would not be here debating this today if the ordinary people affected had not got organised, demonstrated and forced the Government kicking and screaming to take action but now we have to say that the action has to be appropriate and measure up to the latest scientific evidence and be adaptable to the latest scientific evidence. In the water charges movement we had a slogan, probably the most popular slogan of the movement, which was "No way, we won’t pay". That should be the guiding light here as well in terms of the cost being put on individual homeowners who bear no responsibility whatsoever. It is not their fault; they must not be forced to pay financially, emotionally, psychologically and in the massive disruption to their lives. It is not right for all this to be put on them. It is the State and the private companies who are responsible and they should pay not ordinary homeowners.

Sentiment score: -0.19