I ask Senator Ivana Bacik who I support to include me in the list of group leaders. As I am my own leader, Whip and group, I ask her to include me.

Why?

The Leader might recall that some time ago I mentioned Councillor Willie Crowley. May the Lord have mercy on him because he died recently. He championed the cause of the residents of Millfield Manor in Kildare. Millfield Manor was a development of 79 houses and 129 apartments. In March 2015, six of those houses were razed to the ground in 30 minutes by a fire. It was the most devastating fire I had ever seen. I observed one house razed to the ground in seven minutes flat from the time the first flames were seen. The developer of the property went bankrupt in 2011, with debts of over €100 million. The UK system prevented the developer from being a director of a company for ten years. The residents who remain in Millfield Manor are faced with bills in excess of €35,000 to make their houses safe from fire. Mothers and children go to bed every night petrified that there might be another fire. The remedial work has not yet been done and nobody appears to be able to nail down who was responsible for the work. One can imagine how horrified I was last weekend to discover that the same developer was developing properties in Dublin city, having walked away from €100 million of debt. Now, through another company, he is claiming 30 years of construction experience, the best possible standards and so forth. The developer is selling houses for over €500,000 million a pop. There is something terribly wrong in this country when somebody can walk away from his or her responsibilities, set up a new company and head off into the hills again. It is wrong in every sense. I do not know what the Leader, any other Member of the House or I can do about it, but I understood we had put an end to the cowboys back in the 1980s.