Description

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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.

About the Author

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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.

Praise For…

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‘It is hard to imagine that there is another politician in Ireland who has grappled with the minutiae of housing policy in such painstaking detail as Ó Broin…’ —Tony Fahey, The Irish Times
 

‘Ó Broin unveils a radical blueprint to bring our housing crisis to an end … A major contribution to a critical national debate – and should be read by every policy-maker in the sector’ —Andrew Lynch, Sunday Business Post

 

‘lucid prose … a provocative read … succeeds in laying out a plan of action for those looking to work towards an alternative system’ —Joe Joyce, Totally Dublin ‘Ó Broin does something that Ireland has needed for two and a half decades…he offers a practical -and yes radical- alternative to address the needs of the many, not just the fortunate few’ —Cahir O’Doherty, IrishCentral.Com

 

​‘The best contribution the book will make will be to show that the housing crisis can be solved and good quality homes can be provided for all our people’ —Mícheál Mac Donncha, An Phoblacht

 

’An articulate, insightful and accessible analysis of public housing policy in Ireland’ —Nick Garbutt, Scope NI

"Defects is a valuable prism focused on the problems of developer-led construction in Ireland...a clear-sighted and invaluable contribution to a discussion where there is very much at stake." —Adrian Duncan, The Irish Times

"In a biting polemic, but backed up by plenty of evidence and research, Eoin Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin TD for Dublin Mid-West, underlines the serious and continuing impact of the Celtic Tiger on the Irish housing market...This book is a very necessary reminder of what can go wrong in unchecked housing expansion." —Books Ireland