Paul Murphy Demands 100% Redress for Homeowners

The first thing I want to do is to pay tribute to the very many campaigners across the country some of whom are in the gallery and when faced with a situation that you discover that the house that you've bought whatever number of years ago is basically crumbling around you you could be forgiven for you know collapsing into despair and thinking Jesus like there's nothing there's nothing I can do here but we're at the point where we're at and it's still not where we need to be but we're at the point where we're at because the campaigners didn't just take that approach they're backwards to the walls and they just campaigned extremely valiantly extremely eloquently like for example at the committee yesterday and in massive numbers and persistently I had the privilege of speaking to the massive protest thousands and thousands of people in Dublin outside the Customs House I think it was in October last year and the determination and the resilience of the people there was absolutely clear and I just really want to say fair play to you all because you've also helped I'll mention later but you've raised the sights of other people across the country affected by other construction defects that if you campaign actually you can forced change on the government so you've had enormously positive impact in this country the message from the campaigners and it's part of the reason why the campaign has been so effective has always been extremely clear 100% redress nothing less and with a very profoundly strong moral argument behind that which everybody across the country could understand that this is not our fault this is not the fault of homeowners we have no hand act or part to blame in terms of this situation the responsibility the responsibility lies with quarry owners with the builders the developers and with successive governments that have built a republic of developers and quarry owners and so on as opposed to one that serves the interests of ordinary working people and and the problem to summarize and then we'll go into some more details but that the problem that we have at the moment is that the bill as presented is quite far really quite quite quite far from 100% redress nothing less in reality we have a nice big asterisk beside the redress and kind of it's a road to 100% redress and then a whole bunch of small print which has the effect of significantly reducing the amount of redress to significantly less than 100% meaning that homeowners would continue to be in a crisis situation and I just want to read again a crucial part of the statement issued by the different the different campaigns from across the different counties coming together addressing the minister minister let us be clear so our words are not misunderstood if this bill is not amended we the homeowners will not support it we will continue our campaign and protests until it is amended until it is fit for purpose and it doesn't get any clearer than that and the minister knows these people are not joking they're not making you know empty promises they're capable of running extremely effective campaigns campaigns and so at this point we're obviously coming down to the very kind of business end of things here we go through second stays the deadline for amendments has already passed and the time for the government and the minister to make the right decision is quickly or the window for making the right decision is quickly closing and I would just strongly urge you primarily for the benefit of the homeowners owners and but also I would urge you that it's in your own interest to do the right thing here and firstly expand the amount of time that it's being or make sure that the amount of time in terms of committee is expanded to give appropriate consideration and and agree to the amendments that would actually turn this into 100% redress nothing less scheme which is what is absolutely required I mean you can go back to 2017 when the when the Dáil committee was discussing I think it would have been the pyrite scheme at the time and the Dáil committee recommended quote the mission statement of the redress scheme should be ordinary where owners who purchase in good faith should not be liable for the cost of remediation caused by the incompetence negligence or deliberate non-compliance of others you know I mean it's just it's simple there's there's nothing complicated about it and it's very simple in terms of what should happen uh happen um okay to go into things in a little bit more detail um firstly just a a point for anyone who's watching um when we're calling for on this side of the house for more time for debate and so on at the committee something for people to be aware of is that what happens in the Dáil it isn't just that there won't be enough time and therefore there won't be enough exhaustion of the issues and chance for everyone to contribute but that you only get as far as you get in terms of the amendments and then if you haven't reached your amendments they just fall they're just they're just gone if they're not government amendments the government amendments they automatically pass but I understand we don't have government amendments and if they're opposition amendments they automatically disappear in a very undemocratic way they're just defeated so we don't even get to have a vote on them never mind having the kind of exhaustive a comprehensive discussion that is clearly uh necessary um as a result of one the situation that the homeowners are facing and two the amount of money that the state is rightly uh talking about uh spending and so that's one uh point um um second point in terms of going into the the details I mean we agree with the amendments that have been put forward by deputy pringle and others I think there's 80 in total because as the homeowners put forward there's 80 different mistakes and flaws in the in the bill we agree with with all of those um to highlight a few um one the limitation in section five of the bill to a small number of counties I just don't see the logic of doing that it doesn't make sense uh to do that and as we don't yet have a full assessment of where the defective blocks have been uh used and secondly section eight of the bill limiting the scheme to homes built before 2020 uh 2020 again doesn't make sense particularly in the context of the extremely concerning evidence heard by the committee last week that there may well be defective blocks still being produced um as we as we speak um obviously we have to act to ensure that that is not continuing but it means therefore putting some sort of time limit for when the homes would have been uh bought is completely inappropriate um similarly uh limiting the scheme to only owners who bought their home uh before uh 2020 is an unfair and arbitrary uh line um the issue which has been highlighted seems to be vital that the question in terms of section 12 leaving out the cost of replacing foundations when they are affected um again it doesn't make any sense either from the point of view of the homeowners who are being affected by micah or nor from the point of view of the state it won't make any sense for the state to literally spend billions of euros and then have you know whatever proportion of that those billions of of euros going into building on defective foundations which then won't last have to come down have to do it all over again that would be you know really you know really a crime uh for us to go through that uh process um the point in terms of garages and walls being included you know these in reality will constitute a significant reduction in the amount of money that uh homeowners are able to get the point in terms of the cap on um the total amount of money that a homeowner could get not and and you know we have this cap we've already had massive amounts of inflation and we're going to have more by the time the the um the scheme actually comes into operation and clearly it's completely inadequate i also think the point has been extremely well made by the campaigners in terms of no penalty for downsizing um the idea that we should be disincentivizing people from downsizing their house make doesn't make any sense from a justice point of view or from an environmental uh point of view we should build the same house they have now we should be facilitated 100 redress but if they wanted to downsize for whatever uh reason the state should fully support them uh in uh in that using less materials having a smaller carbon uh footprint that is a good thing that in no way that they should be uh penalized uh for and there's a number of other flaws as well which are being addressed with opposition amendments um arbitrary limits uh in terms of grant timings flawed methods in terms of calculating the uh redress um just to move on um in terms of and again this you know features in these debates um but like the fundamental points you know we're in this crisis situation we've been through pyrite now we're dealing with mica and we're going to be dealing with i'll come on to the point but it's you know very significant other read other um construction defects problems in terms of apartments in particular and it is all a microcosm of the failings of the irish political system and its current uh government it is a crumbling monument to all that is wrong and that has been wrong was with the irish construction sector and the political influence of the irish construction uh sector it is the predecessors of the the minister and the predecessors of the government but which also include both fina fall and fina gale down through the years and down through the decades in reality that presided over a system of self-certification uh extremely low levels of regulation and just allowed shoddy work um you know completely inadequate practices to happen all over the place with in reality of different levels quarry owners builders etc all operating simply with the aim of maximizing their profit and cutting corners at the expense of ordinary householders in the first instance and now necessarily the public as a whole in terms of having to pay for a redress scheme so there's two conclusions i i draw from that one what is necessary now 100 redress nothing less paid for by the state and but then the state should mercilessly pursue those who are responsible mercilessly pursue those who have created uh this mess and with a view to maximizing the amount of return uh to the state and you know we if we can prove that there has been um conscious uh and i the homeowners certainly believe there has been conscious like awareness and knowledge of what was happening say in terms of the the quarry owners well then they should be taken out of private ownership no compensation taken into public ownership including assets and so on and all those assets being used to write the wrong for which they are responsible um the second conclusion is that we would be in a much better place to deal with this uh situation if we have a state construction company we need to put us get create a state construction company both to address the housing crisis but also to be able to rapidly address the construction defects uh that are going that have been discovered will be discovered in the uh future and we would very rapidly be able to deal with it as opposed to being reliant on the private market and so on the final point i want to make is um at different phases of this campaign um the tactic of dividing rule has been used by the government or by outriders of the government to kind of say to people in dublin you know you well why would you be paying for the people in donegal or clare or or wherever there's been various articles and newspapers and so on suggesting you know that there's some injustice being done there but what i want to say to all the people in the counties who are affected is that the people i represent in dublin southwest and i believe the vast majority of people in dublin and across the country don't share any of those attitudes what there is from ordinary people in dublin and everywhere else is you know a sense a sentiment of solidarity of fair play and an outrage at the injustice that has been perpetrated on the people who've experienced this in terms of micah and a sense of of course you know why should these people be punished for things that is nothing uh no no fault of of their own the responsibility of quarry owners and construction companies and so on so that divide and rule tactic didn't work at all there was huge upswell of support of solidarity obviously the the extremely effective campaigning the stickers the posters across the whole country and raising awareness about this issue uh played a very important role in that and that was completely ineffective that makes me return to the the point of reference at the start which is that it has given people confidence elsewhere so i'll give you an example and i raised this last week with the the minister in in my constituency and i'm now in touch with a significant group of apartment and duplex owners and these are people in a major apartment complex and where significant defects have been discovered and last week when i spoke here i said to the minister they were they were being told that they needed to pay 15 000 euros in terms of dealing with fire defects and since then they have a quantity surveyors report which says it could be up to 45 000 euros for each apartment and these people aren't able to pay that they don't have that kind of money there's no way that's not going that's going to work it just simply doesn't doesn't work for them and yet they were being presented with the threat that the fire officers were going to shut down access to the building um but because of the micro campaigners they have a sense that this isn't on this isn't right just like people affected by mica this isn't any responsibility of ourselves we couldn't possibly have known this when we bought our apartments and we shouldn't be left with the bill and and so they and others for example i'm aware now of another apartment block in carrot mines are coming together to say we we need redress and obviously i support the call it's been mentioned for uh tax credits in terms of these these schemes but i would make the point tax credits implies that people can pay up front most people don't have 15 grand in the bank never mind 45 grand in the bank that doesn't work and we are now seeing a situation whereby the uh you're you're talking about tens of thousands if not over a hundred thousand apartments in particular built in the celtic tiger era victims of self certification poor regulation shoddy building practices exactly like the the homeowners in terms of micah have experienced and and the idea that these people are going to be able to pay up front to deal with it that's not going to work simply put we're going to need a redress scheme like we've had for pyrite like we absolutely have to have for micah we're going to have to have it for apartment owners duplex owners affected by the shoddy construction that happened during the celtic tiger in particular the fire defects and i understand the the working group it was due to report by the end of june obviously today is is the end of june so i suspect it's another couple of weeks yeah and so it's presumably another couple of weeks away that the working group and complete its its report but i i would say obviously a tax credit if it's included in the budget it's much better than than nothing but it's not going to be enough you know this is a huge problem um which we're we're seeing now um partly as a consequence of micah and people becoming aware of it but then also fire inspections and so on being being done and same basic principle applies and not the fault of the homeowners no fault whatsoever ever of them the victims of the construction industry and governments and the state which poorly regulated the construction industry and therefore the state needs to step in we need to have redress schemes and then we absolutely need to pursue those who are responsible for the situation that we're currently in so i'm kind of putting the the minister on on notice there that unfortunately this won't be the last redress scheme that is needed and and to strongly encourage the minister to take on board the points that are being made to take on board the position of the micah campaigners and to one agree to the extension of the debate and committee to make sure we get to hear all the amendments but two and most importantly accept the amendments um agree to a genuine 100% redress nothing less scheme because it is what is necessary for the homeowners thank you you