I thank to the Chairman and the committee for the opportunity to speak today on the issue of thatch insurance. I am a self-employed chartered quantity surveyor with a postgraduate diploma in applied building repair and conservation. I have significant experience in the area of repairing and maintaining period and vernacular-style properties. To give a sense of my journey in the saga of thatch insurance, following my passion of restoring old buildings, in July 2020, my wife and I purchased a semi-derelict cottage dating from the 1840s in Malahide, north County Dublin. Unfortunately, over the years it had many poor quality alterations carried out on it. The original thatched roof was removed in the 1950s and replaced with an asbestos slate roof. My understanding is that, in the 1950s, a house without a functioning roof was considered ruined and therefore did not attract the relevant property tax. It is evident the issue of maintaining thatch roofs and keeping the buildings they cover in use has been around for many decades.
After engaging an architect and considering our design options for the house, I felt the correct route to restore this cottage was to reinstate the thatched roof for the following reasons. It was built in 1840 and would have been thatched originally, given the vernacular style of the building. It is a semi-detached cottage built as one of a pair. The cottage next door, which is a protected structure, is also thatched. The appearance and appeal of both houses would be greatly improved by removing the asbestos roof and replacing it with a thatched roof to mirror the cottage next door. I have a passion for keeping traditional building skills alive and felt this would be a great project to showcase how an old, tired cottage could be turned into a modern family home while respecting the history and traditional style of the existing cottage. I was fully aware of the risks, issues, costs and intricacies of going down the road of restoring an old cottage, having worked for almost 15 years as a quantity surveyor, primarily in the residential sector in construction.
In the latter half of 2020, we embarked on the arduous task of applying for planning permission to extend and refurbish the cottage. This is where the issues began. Unfortunately, Fingal County Council did not see the merit or logic in reinstating the thatched roof and suggested we either re-slate it or use an alternative material. For the planning department to consider a thatch roof, I would have to prove it had been thatched in the past. I found this quite odd considering it was clearly a pair of semi-detached cottages from the same era, with next door being thatched, but I entertained this and engaged an architectural historian at a considerable expense. The architectural historian, using records from Griffith's Valuation, the 1901 and 1911 censuses and various historical maps, could identify the house, who lived there and establish clearly the house was once thatched in the past.
This is what drove me to start this petition. Little did I know that it is affecting so many people in Ireland. I am only one individual but I know I speak for many people who have strong desires to maintain their heritage at great cost and at the same time being punished for doing so. I reached out to others via social media and many people began to contact me. This led to the Thatch Insurance Action Group being formed. The group’s aim is to drive awareness and campaign for a resolution to the thatched properties insurance crisis. There is a problem with a lack of insurance availability and affordability in Ireland. Any person whose insurance has lapsed, or became unaffordable, or could not avail of it previously, cannot get insurance for their thatched property. The impact of this is that if people accept the risk, it may lead to thatch properties being unable to be freely bought, sold or maintained. This is an urgent and immediate matter that could cost the nation our traditional built heritage. There are many other issues regarding thatch that in the past were looked at in a report commissioned by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, as it was known then, in 2005. This report has remained on paper. Thatch one of 45 sectors in Ireland where insurers will not provide cover, our group looked at options in other countries like the UK where the insurance sector in conjunction with the Government worked on schemes to make the flood cover part of home insurance more widely available. Could a similar scheme for thatch properties be investigated here? We want to see action now so that we protect, appreciate and maintain our heritage. If things don’t change with thatch insurance, there’s a chance that there won’t be any thatch left in the country. If we don’t have action now, within a generation our thatch heritage could be gone.
On review, Fingal County Council eventually agreed to grant us planning permission for the thatched roof.
The next hurdle we faced was finding a thatcher. Thankfully we managed to contact the master thatcher who recently refurbished the cottage next door and he agreed to schedule us in with a lead time of six months. Thatching eventually started in February 2022 and was completed in approximately five weeks at a five-figure cost. Up to this point I had been dealing with my insurance broker about the future insurance of the house to come into effect once the builder had handed over the house to us. We intended to move into the house in July or August but were hit with several delays along the way like so many post-Covid construction projects. I filled in all of the thatch insurance forms for OBF Insurance Limited, OBF, which was the sole insurer in the market at the time. Unfortunately in May 2022, OBF pulled out of the market because its underwriters, Lloyds UK, no longer had an appetite for risk in thatched properties. I now had nowhere to turn for insurance.
I contacted brokers the length and breadth of Ireland, as well as in Scotland, England, Holland and Germany to no avail. None wanted to entertain it and none would even consider the aspects distinguishing a new thatched property from existing thatch properties such as a brand new roof, brand new wiring to modern standards, no spark emitting heat source, etc. Once the word thatch was
mentioned they just didn’t want to know.
The pressure ramped up as the build was coming closer to completion because I was unable to access the final drawdown for my self-build mortgage without insurance. The bank’s terms include a provision that their interest in the property must be insured at my cost. With nowhere else to turn, I contacted the newspapers and told my story. The publicity of the article led me to be in touch with several commercial brokers who managed to arrange quotes via a back-door approach using commercial insurance policies with a house added on. I received quotes ranging from €2,700 to €6,400 per annum. I will be going with the lowest quote I received because I have no other choice but even with this one I have to put significant additional measures in place such as a centrally-monitored, mains-wired and interlinked fire alarm system.
In summary, the process of seeking insurance for our thatched, three bedroom house has been a nightmare for my wife and me. If I had known about the insurance issues we would encounter prior to starting this project, we probably would have slated the roof. It certainly would have been cheaper to build and insure. We did receive a small grant from Fingal County Council and the Department with responsibility for heritage towards the cost of the roof, but this only covered approximately one quarter of the overall cost. The grants appear pointless if the house cannot even be used for its intended purpose. I firmly believe the Department with responsibility for heritage or a similar statutory body needs to step in urgently before every thatched roof in the country is removed and replaced with slate or metal, wiping out the traditional skills of thatching forever.
