All across Ireland, thousands of people are living in apartments and houses 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.

Praise for Defects

‘A devastating critique of a political system in which the power of vested interests ensured that the state abrogated its duty to protect homeowners and tenants. Eoin Ó Broin details the human cost of the self-certification of building regulations that was in place until recent years and asks whether even now we have a regime fit for purpose.’
Mick Clifford