Mick Clifford: Minister faces pull of past and future to address remedial works scheme

Urgency around the planning bill means the remediation scheme on Celtic Tiger apartments has been delayed, lengthening the wait for owners, writes Mick Clifford

Housing Minister Darragh O'Brien is due to speak with representatives from the fire services to come up with a plan for the remedial works scheme

The past and the future are vying for Darragh O’Brien’s attention. Both have urgent calls on his time, but he and the Department of Housing can only do so much.

The future’s call is in the form of the planning bill, currently going through the Oireachtas.

This will be a landmark legislation, but it is attracting a fair degree of controversy. The past is calling on him to make amends for those who went before.

In December 2023, Mr O’Brien introduced a scheme to fund remedial works for Celtic Tiger apartments which were built in a shoddy or dangerous manner. A campaign had taken hold over the last decade to have such a scheme in place. This was a simple matter of justice.

Through the years of illusionary plenty, homes had been built in jig time.

It was later to emerge that this came at a cost. An investigation found that, between 1991 and 2013, up to 100,000 apartments may have been built with fire safety defects, structural defects, or have suffered water ingress.

It has long been accepted that, while errant builders and developers were responsible for this work, there was scant policing of the regulations. This was light touch regulation in action, where the integrity of the work was largely left up to those who were doing it.

When the secrets and lies began to emerge from behind walls in these complexes, many of the builders had gone out of business. Others had resurrected themselves as new entities, bearing no legal responsibility for their previous lives.

The current programme for Government included a provision for a remedial scheme. It was announced in January 2023, but wasn’t finalized until last December.

The estimated cost is somewhere north of €2.5bn. Legislation will have to be enacted to give full force to the scheme, and therein is the clash between the past and the future.

While everybody would like to see the scheme up and running, there is only so much that the department can manage at one time. The urgency attached to the planning bill has meant that the remediation scheme has been pushed back.

Right now, it looks as if the legislation will hardly make it through the Oireachtas by the end of the year. That delays the scheme and lengthens the wait for homeowners who have been dealing with this issue for up to a decade.

A crucial element of the scheme was emergency works that were to take place before the passing of the law.

These works were deemed necessary in instances where fire safety defects posed a potential immediate threat to safety. This issue has arisen for dozens of developments, where management companies have been forced to deploy fire marshals. The marshals patrol a complex 24/7 to ensure that, if a fire breaks out, immediate action to evacuate can be effected.

However, response to this emergency has been delayed. The scheme is being run by the Housing Agency, but any proposed works must be sanctioned by local authority fire services in the affected areas.

A large majority of the stricken apartment complexes are in the Dublin region. Around 130 applications have been made, but none have been processed. According to industry sources, the delay is entirely down to local authorities failing to certify that the works can go ahead.

The authorities are understood to be resisting this largely on the basis that no provision of extra resources has been made to allow them divert personnel to this task.

The situation has become so critical that the minister is now personally intervening.

He is due to meet with representatives from the fire services, along with the City and County Managers Association, to work out a plan.

“Discussions around this issue have so far been positive and productive, and the minister expects the meeting to make further progress in this regard,” a spokesperson for the department said.

They would all certainly want to get the skates on. Some homeowners have already gone to considerable expense to remediate defects, and are in debt that is costing them on an ongoing basis.

More urgent is the plight of those whose homes are deemed to still pose a considerable risk to life and safety in the event of a fire.

While the impasse persists, they continue to live with the stress.

Pat Montague, of the Construction Defects Alliance — the main body which lobbied for the scheme — says it is deeply disappointing that, five months after it was established, none of those whose homes are deemed dangerous have been able to access the fund.

“The fact that the apartment complexes have yet to receive any funding under the scheme has led to a lot of confusion and anxiety,” he said.

“We very much welcome the fact that the minister is personally meeting the fire services, and it’s vital in order to maintain the confidence of apartment owners in the scheme that there is a clear pathway forward on the resolution of the fire services issue, with a definitive timeline as to when applicants can expect to receive their funding under the scheme.”