Mother outlines heart breaking impact of defective home on her children

Eileen McLaughlin Long addressed the audience at an international conference, held in Letterkenny on Tuesday, on the science and societal impact of defective blocks.

The mother-of-three, who is married to Stephen, outlined how their ‘forever home’ was finished in 2006, one month before their wedding. Ten ‘happy’ years followed and while they noticed cracks, they ‘put them down to settling cracks.’

As the cracks got wider, Eileen and Stephen became more concerned and the word ‘mica’ was becoming more common and well-known locally.

Six years ago, Stephen stripped off some plaster and the block behind it crumbled. "We knew, without doubt, the home had mica,” said Eileen.

After core testing was completed, the ‘shocking’ results were returned, showing the presence of mica, pyrite and pyrrhotite and the couple was told their home needed to be demolished.

This, said Eileen, was ‘heart breaking and soul destroying’.

She told those gathered at the conference and watching online how it is ‘impossible’ to hide the issue from their eldest son, Tiernan, who is 11.

She outlined how, when he was eight, after overhearing his parents speaking about the cost of rebuild, he gave them his moneybox and said the money would help fix the house. Eileen highlighted how no child of that age should ‘have to worry about bills’ or carry that burden.

She explained how her daughter, Samarah, is seven and when she was five, Eileen saw her staring into a crack in the outside wall.

“Here’s the conversation she had with her baby doll, Emily. She said: ‘I’m sorry, you can’t have a sleepover tonight. The house might fall down and we’ll get our leg broken or our head broken and then we’ll get ‘deaded’ – as she explained in her five-year-old language. She then said: ‘But, you can stay next week, when the man comes to build our new house.”

Their youngest child, Matthew, who is three, is ‘starting to put sentences together’ and recently said: ‘Wall all broke: Daddy fix it.’

Eileen told how she and Stephen sacrificed holidays, clothes etc to build their home and he had to cash in his pension fund early in order to pay for core testing.

She also used compensation money from a serious back injury sustained in a collision to invest in their ‘dream home.’

" At least some good was going to come out of the constant pain – a home I could be proud of. I look now and think, what a waste of money.”

Eileen, who along with her husband has bought a second-hand mobile home to live in, compared living in a mica home to ‘being trapped in a prison with no escape.”

They were approved for demolition two years ago, ‘but are still no further ahead.’

Eileen outlined how the current defective blocks scheme will still leave ‘the majority of families with a deficit running into tens of thousands of euro’.

She asked where the ‘moral obligation’ of government is to homeowners and urged them to ‘give us closure, build our homes and allow us to finally live in peace’.