“Our houses are collapsing all around us”: in Ireland, a cry of alarm in the face of the ravages of mica

Published on : 11/17/2021 – 5:14 PMModified : 19/11/2021 – 13:19

Hearing a creaking wall in the middle of the night is everyday life for the people of County Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland. Homeowners in this region have banded together and are asking the government to renovate their homes, which are falling apart. In question, housing built quickly, with rocks very rich in mica, a mineral which after several years cracks, crumbles, then turns to dust.

Mica, a naturally occurring mineral found in quarry rocks in Donegal, has been found in excessive amounts in boulders used in the construction of many houses in the area. The source of cracks and other damage, it is believed to be responsible for anomalies in nearly 7,000 homes. Homeowners have shared a series of photos and videos of their deteriorated homes to draw attention to the issue and get the authorities to react.

“In your bed at night you can hear the walls cracking.”

Michael Doherty is the public relations manager for the Mica Action Group (MAG), which aims to obtain support from the authorities in rebuilding the affected houses.

Pieces of wall sometimes come loose and some houses had to be evacuated because the state of their structure was no longer secure enough. In my house, I can walk through the exterior wall with my bare hands, then through the insulation until I reach the harder plaster of the interior wall. This shows how fragile the walls are.

It’s frankly scary: you can lie in your bed at night and hear the walls crack. We just hope it’s not near another crack because if they come together it can be catastrophic.

Some families end up living in one or two rooms, on the relatively safer side of their home. Our biggest fear today is that a storm severe enough to bring down our house will hit the region during Christmas time.

Irish laws prohibit the use of building materials containing more than one percent mica. But in Donegal, some houses contain more than 15%.

Most of these houses were built during the “Celtic Tiger” years, a period of rapid economic growth between the mid-90s and the end of the 2000s. The construction industry was booming at that time. apogee, over 90,000 homes were built in just one year.

To meet this growing demand for construction, a number of companies have started to use materials containing much more mica than the allowable limit.

The blocks that pose a problem today have, however, passed certain checks when the houses were built, such as robustness tests. But it is over the long term and depending on climatic conditions that they have deteriorated. This is because the mineral picks up the surrounding moisture, which has an impact on the strength of the blocks used to build the houses and causes them to crack and crumble after about five years, selon the report of a group of experts published in 2017.

“There was no one to regulate it all, the authorities trusted the quarries to do the right thing.”

Michael Doherty continues:

The quarries struggled to provide enough boulders, so they settled in areas where the rock was excessively rich in mica. There was no one to regulate it all, the authorities trusted the quarries to do the right thing. But the problem here is that you don’t see what is wrong right away. It takes five or six years for the construction problems to surface. Then the situation only gets worse from year to year.

MAG was created ten years ago when Michael Doherty and other homeowners started noticing cracks in their homes. Very quickly, they realized that the presence of the mineral in the rock concerned thousands of dwellings in the region and then decided to confront the government with this non-compliance with the regulations on mica.

“My daughter no longer wants to sleep in her room”

After realizing that mica was in the house he built for his family, Paddy Diver, a Donegal resident, created a grassroots movement to raise awareness of this issue, which is organizing public protests and fundraising.

I always kept this question in the back of my mind, hoping that I wasn’t one of the homes affected by mica. I have been working in construction since I was 16. I built my house ten years ago, but about four years ago the cracks started to appear and get bigger and bigger. It is as if cancer is attacking our house from the inside. Each year, it progresses a little more. Today I can remove crumbling blocks from the wall with my bare hands.

I think the house will last another year, maybe two. It is heartbreaking. I reassure my children because I know the house is quite solid, but the cracks are terrifying. My daughter no longer wants to sleep in her room. We had to move her bed to our room as she is 8 years old and does not feel safe if I am not in the room. As for my oldest son, he wakes up at 3 a.m. because he can’t sleep because of the crackles.

Last October, Paddy Diver and thousands of other Donegal residents traveled to Dublin to demonstrate and send a message to the Irish government.

Up to 200,000 euros to repair the damage

In 2020, the government proposed a repair program allowing homeowners to be reimbursed up to 90% of their reconstruction costs. But Paddy Diver and Michael Doherty say that in practice, homeowners end up having to pay much more than expected to repair their homes: some would have to pay 30,000 to 200,000 euros out of pocket to repair the damage, and for houses for which they have already taken out mortgages. Homeowners must also pay more than 5,000 euros to perform a mica test before being eligible.

The Mica Action Group lobbied authorities to cover all of the necessary costs for all affected homeowners and to organize an independent public inquiry to determine how the bad blocks could have be fabricated and ensure that it does not happen again.

On October 21, 2021, a construction company implicated in the scandal, Cassidy Brothers, was ordered to shut down one of its concrete plants. Cassidy Brothers, which was the largest supplier of blocks in County North Donegal, said in a statement in 2018 that it now only manufactures products from raw materials obtained through different suppliers. Careers, on the other hand, are now under scrutiny by the Attorney General of Ireland.

County Donegal is not the only place in the country affected by this type of problem – houses in Mayo and other neighboring counties have also been built with blocks of mica. Ten thousand houses across Ireland would also be altered by another mineral, pyrite, which has equally harmful effects.

With other activists, MAG will plead their cause in the European Parliament next month.