Paul Murphy: Government trying to bury concrete scandal

Thanks a lot to Gerald Ward for bringing this very important motion forward and for his kind of diligent attention to detail approach on this issue which is about making sure that the government cannot get away with just burying this issue, with just saying the issue is now dealt with because it's definitely not dealt with. And this has fundamentally been the approach of the last number of governments in terms of trying to bury this issue from the very start of the scandal. The campaign started back in 2011, affected households were fobbed off for nearly 10 years, forced to campaign very strongly, forced to protest, 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 want to really pay tribute to the campaigners who have got us to this point but who continue to push. I also want to thank them for their generosity of time and solidarity in terms of assisting us when we were getting the campaign in terms of redress for those affected by apartment and duplex defects off the ground when they had plenty of things on their plate themselves but were nonetheless willing to come to big meetings, small meetings, to talk about your own 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 then various corporate operators operating like Cowboys to maximise profits at the expense of ordinary householders. The problem is that we now have this remediation scheme but it may be based on faulty scientific evidence. We've heard from Deputy Ward there how IS 465 2026 simply may not stand the test of time. In fact it actually acknowledges that itself in admitting that there is uncertainty about the scientific evidence and that uncertainty might not be anyone's fault but it's certainly not the fault of affected households. We know that for a fact and that has to be the guiding principle in this. None of this is the fault of affected households, none of it whatsoever. So they should not be the ones to suffer the consequences and unfortunately the reality is that they have been the only ones to suffer any real consequences up to this point. Pending the outcome of legal cases it's still not clear if Donegal County Council, the National Standards Authority or the block suppliers and quarry operators will be made to pay. Cassidy Brothers Concrete Products Limited, Cassidy Brothers Top Mix Limited and Cranford Concrete Products Limited are all being taken to court by affected households. The scale of this scandal remains absolutely huge. I mean the thing there's a load of scientific evidence and kind of detail we heard in the briefing organized by Charles Ward and the 100% redress party yesterday but I have to say that the thing that stuck with me the most was the evidence suggesting that we're not even at the middle of this scandal yet, we're only in the early phases of this scandal. I really think like the broad public outside of the counties where you've most have most affected households up to this point, the broad public would be shocked to realize that we're just at the start of this process and I think the government may be shocked to realize this but the evidence presented was very very strong and the latest scientific evidence is that 20,000 houses in estates in Donegal, Mayo, Clare and Limerick are affected. That doesn't include one-off housing which we know there's a lot of in those counties, it doesn't include social housing, it doesn't include commercial premises or community buildings. We also know that defective concrete is not confined to those four counties and that it's a problem in other counties as well but we don't have any real sight of the sort of numbers that would be involved there. So the 20,000 households is not the whole picture but only part of it and 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 and the evidence presented yesterday was absolutely compelling. Geoscientists Professor Paul Dunlop and Dr. Chris Brough told us about sulfide oxidation, internal sulfate attack, long-term deterioration mechanisms in defective concrete that can affect retained foundations. That's a huge problem because the foundation of your house is exactly that. It's the foundation upon which everything else rests. If the foundation is faulty then your whole house, your whole home, your whole life is insecure. You're literally resting on faulty foundations. I'm the last speaker in this slot. You're taking the additional five forward. Just imagine, so no matter what's happened kind of above ground, if your foundations are faulty you've got a very very big problem. Just imagine the psychological impact of that for a moment. You've already gone through the heartache and we've all seen the pictures, we've all heard the stories, we've all talked to Charles about the reality of living in such a house. You've gone through the heartache of your home falling apart. You've gone through the massive stress of campaigning potentially to fight for some sort of justice for yourself, for your family, for your local community. You've gone through the hassle of applying for remediation, the disruption of having it 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. I mean that's an unthinkable prospect for people. It's enough to drive anyone over the edge. Even if demolition isn't 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's still a bad smell around it for prospective buyers and for banks and for insurance companies. They may face difficulties remortgaging or if they need to sell for whatever reason, they need to move somewhere else in the country, need to move out of the country for whatever reason, they simply can't sell their house and so they're stuck with this. And all of this then, that insult to injury, can be passed on to their children after they die. Turning what has been a nightmare for one generation into a nightmare for the next. An intergenerational nightmare which fundamentally responsibility rests with the state and with the various companies. And the underlying issue underpinning all of 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, that failed to police them and the state that came up with flawed remediation schemes which we were warned about at the time. Let's remember that this isn't just in you know glorious informed hindsight and so on. We had some of these arguments at the time. None of this is the fault of the homeowners and yet they are still paying for this every single day. We wouldn't be here debating this today if ordinary people affected, hadn't gotten organized, hadn't demonstrated, hadn't forced the government kicking and screaming to take action. But now we have to say that the action has to be appropriate, has to measure up to the latest scientific evidence, it has to 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. And I think 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's not their fault, they must not be forced to pay. I mean both financially, in terms of emotionally, in terms of psychologically, in terms of the massive disruption to their life. It is not right for all this to be put on them. It's the state and the private companies responsible who are responsible. They should pay, not ordinary homeowners.