People living in homes made from defective concrete blocks gathered at Leinster House in Dublin on Tuesday to call for urgent intervention and a workable 100 per cent redress scheme.
Attendees described the problems they faced living in damaged homes, attempting to recover the value of their houses and trying to access financial support.
“It’s just somewhere we have to exist for now, we’re not living,” a homeowner from Co Mayo said.
Margaret Walsh from Belmullet built her “forever home” 17 years ago. Since then, cracks have formed on the inside and outside of her home, the window panes have broken from the pressure of the blocks, the windows are letting in water and the walls have damp and black mould issues.
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Despite receiving confirmation from a technical report that her home has defective concrete, she currently cannot access the Government’s grant scheme as her engineer says the property does not meet the visual damage threshold.
“It’s not mortgageable, it’s not sellable, it’s not insurable. I’m so angry that I have to pay that mortgage on a valueless asset,” she said.
The Defective Concrete Block grant scheme helps homeowners to repair or rebuild their homes where significant damage has been caused by the presence of pyrite or mica in the blocks used to build it. These minerals can cause cracks and other defects to appear in the homes.
Walsh is a member of the Mayo Pyrite Action Group and one of the organisers of the protest.
In 2021, another organiser, Nicola Byrne, and her husband Derek bought their “dream home” in Clogher, Co Mayo. At the time, they had the house checked by an engineer.
But after the purchase, they realised the house had defective concrete.
She described a “series of hurdles” she has had to pass to get to where she is now. Having bought her house after the scheme’s cut-off point of 2020, she was accepted on to the scheme after spending five months proving that she was “not a vulture fund and did not willingly buy a home with defective concrete”.
Then it was discovered that the attic, where they keep a sensory room for their three children with complex needs and an office for them to work from home, had not been granted planning permission and would require retention permission costing anything up to €5,000.
They are in the early stage of the scheme and feel certain that their home will need to be demolished and rebuilt. “The blocks are so defective, they’re like butter. They just chew right through,” she explained.
So far, the family has spent over €45,000 on “essential” repairs. If the home is demolished, she faced having to pay €1,800 a month on a mortgage, €2,000 a month on a temporary house to rent and a €250,000 shortfall because the scheme’s cap means it will not cover full rebuild costs.
“The Government is failing me in a house that’s crumbling, and they won’t fix it for me and my children,” she said.
A spokesman for the Department of Housing said a Bill to amend the scheme was being brought to Cabinet this week, adding that “the Government is making sure that the scheme is designed and delivered in a manner that meets the real needs of homeowners”.
