Paul Murphy: Demands 100% Redress for Defective Concrete Homes

thanks very much and yeah firstly just want to really start thank Charles for that excellent speech for his campaigning and and all the campaigners he connected to I mean it's um it's a rare day in the Dáil that you have a motion that's signed by the entirety of the opposition and that speaks to the injustice that is being inflicted on people here and but it also speaks to the incredible campaigning that has been taking place for years now and I've had the pleasure of meeting with many campaigners speaking as one of the massive marches that happened in Dublin and also getting the benefit of of their assistance actually in terms of working with people to establish a similar 100 percent redress campaign for those affected by apartment and duplex defects and these campaigners are always generous with their time with their advice looking to help others even though they've got enough problems of their own as illustrated by Charles there in terms of what they face when they when they go home and and I think you know I remember at the start of this emerging issue there were attempts to effectively divide and rule the country to say that you know people in Dublin or whatever don't don't care about this issue and in the government doesn't really try that anymore and those that would see this injustice continue don't try it anymore because it's clear that broad public support is with those who are affected by defective concrete there's a sense of just how awful it is the injustice that's been done to them the responsibility of the state for that injustice and the necessity of a proper genuinely 100% redress scheme and the motion which is comprehensive clearly outlines what the real issues are families forced to wait for years for redress and remediation in crumbling homes suffering immense emotional psychological and financial distress worrying as Charles just outlined that their homes may fall down around them that the ceiling will come down on them listening out for cracking sounds at night how anyone can live like that be forced to live like that by this state is outrageous being forced to move out during storms having partial repair works done that do not fix the problem going into debt so in in this situation facing this horror day in day out and going into debt to fund repairs themselves then being given the runaround over and over by representatives of the state who are meant to be helping them but instead who deny who obfuscate who gaslight them instead an elephant in the room here is that it's not just private homes that are affected of course schools health centers community buildings other critical infrastructure have also been built with defective blocks the government is doing even less about that and I hope that it doesn't take a tragedy a total building collapse to force us to act engineers Ireland have confirmed that IS 465 is not fit for purpose it is scientifically unsound it arbitrarily excludes many homes with concealed structural failures so minister why is it still being used is it because it saves the state money for now this is incredibly short-sighted just like the so-called light touch regulation that caused this crisis in the first place it will end up costing the state more in the long run when homes have to be remediated multiple times because remediation wasn't done properly the first time around that's without taking into account the personal toll the personal cost the mental health burden and so on of that process IS 465 must be urgently replaced with a fit for purpose standard that actually follows the science the government says and it's in their counter motion that the defective concrete block scheme isn't redress or compensation it's just a grant why would they say that what's the logic of that when you've had a campaign for redress everybody calls it redress it's what people understand it to be redress and it's saying it to try to wriggle out of responsibility for the crisis that's why it's saying it it's saying it to deny the lived reality of thousands of homeowners people whose walls are crumbling whose children live in uncertainty whose lives are disrupted by lack of regulation but a scheme cannot absolve the state of responsibility just by changing the name of itself by calling itself a grant homeowners know the truth they will not be gaslit that this is some kind of present the grant from the state a kind of language is fooling nobody the government's motion is full of weasel words designed to sound good but on closer inspection they tall it turn out to be full of holes a lot like defective concrete it says that homeowners can get grants for a hundred percent of eligible expenditure sounds good and that you know that that kind of message is designed for people who are not affected it's designed to say to people who are not affected oh don't worry these people are getting what they asked for and if you hear any moaning about it they're just they're just being difficult but it's not accurate it's not true it turns out that lots of critical expenditure does not qualify as eligible expenditure and there's an arbitrary cap on the scheme the government is also being economical with the truth when it claims that early movers are not being penalized many of them cannot get retrospective payments and have been forced to accept a flawed scheme or nothing that violates their constitutional rights to equal treatment before the law and it must be addressed the state's poor treatment of the victims here resembles what it tries to do to all other victims of state mistreatment and injustice you look at the residential abuse survivors hunger striking outside the doll because they've been denied access to health care let's remember the root cause of all of this distress corporate greed and the failure of the government to restrain it by properly regulating the construction sector the same issues arose the same dynamic behind the issues in terms of apartment and duplex defects from the 1990s onwards has anything fundamentally changed the latest policy from the government is to reduce apartment standards so developers can make even more profit I'm sure the same arguments were made in the past about viability viability by the way just means profit it means giving more profit to developers and as a reason not to properly regulate the construction sector and to regulate construction materials there's a real injustice here that those responsible have not been prosecuted or even at the very least forced to pay compensation for the harm that they have caused that they continue to cause instead we have a concrete levy that spreads the cost very widely to those with no responsibility while at the same time the victims are still not being properly compensated we have to ask why does this corporate impunity happen again and again and again we saw it before with the developers and the banks who crashed the economy were allowed to get off scot-free while ordinary people suffered years of crippling austerity the same is happening here with the victims of defective blocks while the quarries and the block manufacturers are getting off scot-free there's also no accountability from the government of the day 2017 expert panel reports told us told us that local authorities weren't given the funds by central government to enforce building control regulations and building control authorities were unable to test construction materials in-house whose responsibility is that minister that's on the state that's on the current government which includes the same parties some of the same individuals that are still sitting in cabinet today Taoiseach Michal Martin presided over this crisis from the very beginning is still in there today trying to limit his government's responsibility for it we in people before profit fully support 100% redress for all those affected by this crisis none of it is their fault they must be fully compensated and those responsible should be held to account including the quarries the block manufacturers the builders who knowingly used defective materials and I would say the Galway tent Fianna Fáil government who allowed it to happen who allowed it to happen so that some could maximize their profits at the cost of immense ongoing distress for ordinary people