I visited the Ardara Community Childcare centre yesterday and I was horrified to see the effect the defective blocks are having on the building. Ardara Community Childcare opened a purpose-built premises in the heart of Ardara town in 2007 after securing funding from the EU's special support programme for peace and reconciliation and with the help of many local funding initiatives in Ardara. Since then, it has provided vital childcare for hundreds of families in the area and the surrounding areas, and provides an essential after-school service for children attending six national schools close to the facility. There is no doubt that this childcare service is extremely important to the people of Ardara. Many people rely on this service and many parents have stated they would be unable to work without it. It was devastating for them to discover the findings of a recent defective block report, which showed significant defective concrete materials in all five of the tested areas, including the building's foundations.

The report recommended that the building be demolished and rebuilt due to the high levels of pyrite, pyratite and free mica. However, disgracefully, there is no Government funding available for this.

Ardara Community Childcare is a community organisation with a voluntary board of directors and has charitable status. We have been telling the Government since the introduction of the redress scheme that defective blocks would be found in buildings such as this, yet the Government has refused to listen and now community organisations such Ardara Community Childcare are faced with this dire situation through no fault of theirs. They are in this position because of the Government's light-touch regulation and now the Government refuses to address or rectify the effect light-touch regulation has had on community buildings across Donegal. In response to a question regarding Ardara Community Childcare, the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, stated that this is a unique situation. I dispute this completely. This is certainly not a unique situation, as the Government would know if it had listened to the Opposition and the people affected from the beginning.

Defective blocks are already having a detrimental effect on many important services across Donegal, such as Raphoe Community Playgroup and Letterkenny Community Childcare, and this is only the beginning. As the years go on, we will start to see the effects of detective blocks in far more community public buildings in Donegal and across the entire country. The Government must address this now before the issue gets completely out of hand and many vital services are forced to close as a result. There is no way organisations like Ardara Community Childcare will be able to raise the money required to demolish and rebuild the building as a small community. Without vital Government funding, it will be forced to close its doors during a crisis in childcare and this will be devastating for the town of Ardara. What will the Government do to ensure this does not happen and that buildings with these defective blocks will be remedied?

I thank Deputy Pringle for raising two important issues which are clearly intertwined here - the issue of concrete blocks and particularly the devastating impact that is having in his constituency to community childcare facilities. He made specific reference to Ardara but also referred to Raphoe and Letterkenny. The Department of children is aware of the service in Ardara and it is aware of the impact that defective blocks are having on that service. My understanding is that the Department is examining how it can repurpose existing capital funding in the Department to assist in that case. My understanding is that the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and his officials are working on this through what they call the Department's sustainability process.

I want the Deputy to know there is an awareness of this issue in Government. There is a real willingness to try to engage and come up with a solution, perhaps separate and distinct from the broader issue of the existing scheme for defective concrete blocks. Considerable work has gone into the enhanced scheme which is now open for applications. The final regulations came as a result of extensive consultation with key stakeholders and the new scheme is now providing very considerable enhancements. As we have discussed in the past, I believe the previous scheme received 1,644 applications with another 514 to the enhanced scheme at the end of May.

While what the Deputy is clearly highlighting today may not be a new issue, it is certainly a new issue to me in the sense that community childcare facilities are now being affected by defective blocks. Obviously, the Government will need to take that extremely seriously. I am pleased that the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and his departmental officials have an awareness of it. They will engage on the issue, and I know they are actively examining how their existing capital funding could be repurposed to assist in this case. I suggest that the Minister might engage directly with the Deputy on the matter.

I thank the Taoiseach for his response. I also thank the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, because it is vital that this is recognised. This requires a whole-of-government approach. This is a crisis that will only get worse. Community buildings, private buildings, factories and farm buildings across Donegal will all be collapsing over the next few years because of the defective concrete crisis. It will extend across the country because this is not only a Donegal issue. It has been highlighted in Donegal where it is worst, but it will expand across the whole country. The Government needs to get on top of it. It could amend IS 465 to include pyrite and pyratite as defective materials. That is very simply done. Doing that would mean many people would be able to repair their houses as things stand.

That is a slightly different issue but I point to how the Government is embracing this whole problem. This, unfortunately, is going to be a massive problem. How do you make sure this never happens again? You make sure proper regulations are put in place and enforced, rather than doing away with regulations.

I thank Deputy Pringle for raising this issue and I acknowledge he raises it regularly, as do other colleagues in County Donegal. I accept a statement of the obvious. The Deputy has rightly said that the Government and I are aware this is not just a Donegal issue. It is important to say that. My note mentions counties Mayo, Clare and Limerick as other areas that have been affected. The Government recently took a decision to include Sligo County Council too. I am aware this is an issue that first came to visibility in Donegal with devastating effects, worry and stress for people. However, it is not one that is exclusive to Donegal. We have a back and forth in this Chamber - which is one of the reasons it is here - to speak up for constituents, but I think the Government has endeavoured to make a real intervention of incredible scale. We continue to work our way through issues as they arise.

The Deputy raised another relatively new issue relating to community childcare. We are now engaging on that too although today, because I do not want to be disingenuous, I will not be prescriptive about how we help that community childcare centre he referenced in Ardara. I will ask the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, to continue his engagement and reply to the Deputy directly.