COMMENT: Cowboy builders should hang their heads in shame
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Wednesday January 13 2010
IF we have learned one thing from the past three weeks of freezing weather it is just how far some building standards seem to have slipped in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger era.
As builders and developers clamoured to erect more and more housing estates across the country, shortcuts were sometimes taken and in some cases these have been starkly highlighted by the big chill.
Many hundreds of houses, old and new, across Kerry have been left without water because of pipes that froze and then burst. In some cases this happened because homeowners failed to take adequate precautions against frost. In other cases it just happened because of the unprecedented freeze and no homeowner or builder could have preventedit. Sadly in some cases however the blame must fall at the feet of cheapskate, cowboy builders.
Desperate to save every last penny during construction, before slapping enormous price tags on the houses they built, these unscrupulous builders cut corners wherever possible. It is now becoming painfully clear that one of these corners was the insulation and plumbing of houses
hese builders paid scant attention to government regulations which specify how deep piping needs to be buried to avoid a freeze. Rather than spend the few extra euro needed to provide suitable trenches, these pipes were thrown down with barely a cover of topsoil.
If you're corner cutting builder and you're reading this you should be ashamed of yourself.
However, it's not just these builders who need to take a long hard look at themselves and the chaos their meanness has caused.
There are very strict regulations governing the standards Irish houses must be built to. Obviously these regulations are supposed to be enforced. It would seem, however, that in some cases there wasn't adequate supervision of builders and substandard homes were allowed onto the market.
Those misfortunes without water surely deserve an explanation at the very least. The authorities may not be able to fix their pipes, but maybe they can provide a few answers about how things got to this point in the first place.
