Pyrite: the buck stops where?

County View

John Healy

There has been an understandable wave of sympathy for the thousands of homeowners who have fallen foul of the pyrite disaster and who now seek some redress from the calamity they find themselves in. It is beyond question that the Government will have to devise a scheme adequate to their needs, and a more realistic one than what has been on offer so far.

It would take a hard heart to insist that the standard doctrine of caveat emptor – let the buyer beware – should apply in the pyrite cases. To the question of whether those affected should be fully and completely recompensed – if indeed the mental trauma of what they are enduring can even be compensated for – the answer has to be a resounding yes.

But even in the black despair of their distress, it could well be asked whether the pyrite victims are knocking on the wrong door in their quest for justice.

The homeowners are blameless for what has befallen them. They were badly let down by those they had put their trust in. But equally, the Government – which has now emerged as the saviour of last resort – can arguably maintain that the finger of culpability should point elsewhere.

In the ten years since the defective blocks problem first appeared, a small army of professionals, architects, surveyors and engineers, have earned handsome fees in signing off on the soundness of such houses and their compliance with standards of safety and stability. Any house purchaser who had occasion to seek a mortgage towards the cost of these now crumbling homes – and that was virtually all – can only be too well aware of the strict conditions before a lender will release the required funds, the most essential being the certification of approval from a competent professional.

All of which prompts the question of where the first point of redress should be. If a professional surveyor signs off on a property that later turns out to be as stable as a biscuit, then surely that professional is liable for the loss and damage suffered by the subsequent owner?

And surely it stands to reason that the mortgagee who advanced the monies on foot of a misleading certificate should be required to pursue the costs in that forum, rather than wash its hands of responsibility and expect the Government to pick up the pieces?

Or, further back, should not the supplier of the faulty material be held responsible for the consequences?

Maybe it is timely that, only a week ago, a former senior manager with the now defunct Irish Nationwide Building Society told an enquiry that the lending policies of the company needed to be taken ‘with a pinch of salt’. Every file he had looked at had actually been missing some essential documentation, including, crucially, valuation and surveyor reports. Not one file, he said, was in order; it was commonplace to ignore vital information.

There is little doubt but that the Government has a duty to implement a meaningful redress scheme for pyrite victims, which means much more than 100 percent replacement costs, let alone the 90 percent currently on offer. But the Government is understandably hesitant to write a blank cheque for a scheme to which a €1 billion price tag might turn out to be a gross under-calculation.

The real doomsday is that, apart from those homes which are already crumbling before the eyes of the owners, there are hundreds of apparently good homes which have already tested positive for pyrite, and for which it is only a matter of time.