Defects

All across Ireland, thousands of people are living in apartments with serious fire safety and structural defects. Some of these have made the news, many more have not. Defects: Living with the Legacy of the Celtic Tiger tells the horrifying story of these people and how they came to be trapped in dangerous homes. In this follow-up to Home, his hugely popular and acclaimed manifesto for public housing reform, Eoin Ó Broin reveals how decisions made by successive governments from the 1960s to the 1990s led to an alarmingly light touch building control regime. This regime, when combined with the hubris and greed of Celtic Tiger-era property development, allowed defective and unsafe properties to be built and sold in huge numbers to unsuspecting victims. Who was responsible? Why were they allowed to get away with it? And who will foot the bill to fix these potentially fatal defects? All these questions and more are answered in this hard-hitting and shocking investigative work.

Eoin Ó Broin is a TD for Dublin Mid-West and Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on Housing, Planning, and Local Government. He is author of Matxinada, Basque Nationalism and Radical Basque Youth Movements (LRB 2003), Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism (Pluto 2009), and Home: Why Public Housing is the Answer (Merrion Press, 2019). He is a regular contributor to the Sunday Business Post and An Phoblacht.