Sinn Féin drafting alternative Mica legislation to fix government’s ‘defects’

Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on Housing Eoin Ó Broin has said he is drafting a new piece of defective blocks legislation to meet homeowners’ needs.

The legislation is being prepared for introduction in six months’ time, which is as soon as Oireachtas rules allow following the passing of the government’s current bill.

Deputy Ó Broin said his scheme will “fix all the inadequacies in the government’s legislation that will continue to be in the new scheme if the regulations in the new scheme are not gotten right.”

Deputy Ó Broin was speaking after a visit to Donegal on Monday where he visited three crumbling Mica homes. The homes, he said, had shocking levels of damp and posed very real health and safety dangers to residents.

“I’ve seen the videos and the photographs, I’ve spoken at length with affected homeowners, but there is nothing as impactful as going into someone’s home and seeing the damage,” Deputy Ó Broin told Donegal Daily.

He visited a Letterkenny family that had to abandon their kitchen and a bedroom because of internal dampness. The inner leaf of the brick is so damp and deteriorating that the family can no longer use any of the electrics in the kitchen because it shorts the entire electrics in the house.

“I have experience of extreme damp and mould in 1930s and 1940s flat complexes in Dublin, even those pale in comparison to the houses I was in yesterday,” Deputy Ó Broin said.

He also visited two neighbours in Buncrana. One of them, he said, was a woman in her early 70s who received an engineers’ report this week recommending full demolition and rebuild.

“The woman was hardly able to speak without crying because of the huge impact of not knowing is there going to be a scheme that will fund full like-for-like replacement or will she be €10,000, €20,000, €30,000 or €40,000 short under the new scheme,” Deputy Ó Broin said.

Deputy Ó Broin, his Donegal-based colleague Padraig Mac Lochliann TD and local Sinn Féin councillors brought homeowners’ concerns before a meeting with senior housing officials in Donegal County Council yesterday. The cumbersome application process and the restrictive nature of IS 465 were among the main issues discussed. From the meeting, Deputy Ó Broin said he will be writing to the Minister for Housing today to seek interim government guidelines for engineers when there is a dispute between an engineers’ report and IS 465, which only allows demolition and rebuild in very specific circumstances.

Deputy Ó Broin said that the 80 amendments proposed by Mica/Pyrite groups for the government’s enhanced Mica scheme will form the skeleton of his legislation.

“We want to take our lead from the affected homeowners in the counties who have been working hard to reach a compromise on an acceptable scheme,” he said.

“Not only do we want to fix all the defects in the government’s bill but we want to make sure our legislation is high quality and fit for purpose.”

Deputy Ó Broin said the scheme will address key issues such as the SCSI square footage rates, no-penalty downsizing, the damage threshold and provide for a fully-independent appeals process.

Deputy Ó Broin’s visit to Donegal was part of a series of constituency visits he is conducting to explore housing and homelessness issues on a local level. He also met with the North West Simon to discuss the housing crisis in the county and visited the Cathedral Quarter in Letterkenny ahead of the Special Conference on Dereliction.