Latent Defects & Time Limits in Ireland

No topic on this site destroys more otherwise-winnable cases than this one. Building defects claims die not on their merits but on their dates — because Irish limitation law starts clocks earlier than owners assume, offers no general mercy for reasonable ignorance, and punishes the most natural instinct in home ownership: waiting to see if it gets worse.

The Framework

• Contract: six years from the breach — for building work, generally from practical completion of the defective works;
• Contracts under seal: twelve years — occasionally decisive where formal deeds were used;
• Tort (negligence): six years from when the damage becomes manifest — the battleground, governed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brandley v Deane;
• Personal injuries: two years — where a defect hurts someone, an entirely different and shorter regime.

Brandley v Deane: Defect vs Damage

The Supreme Court’s framework distinguishes the defect (the negligent foundations) from the damage (the cracking that later results): time in tort runs from when the damage is manifest — capable of being discovered and proved by a plaintiff — not from the defective work itself, and crucially not from when you actually discovered it. Irish law declined a general discoverability rule for property damage: the owner who reasonably had no idea is, hard as it sounds, not thereby protected. The two edges of the ruling: hidden damage that only recently became manifest can make an old build freshly actionable — and damage that was quietly manifest years ago can have expired a claim you thought was young.

Why “Monitoring” Is the Fatal Habit

The statute-barred file always tells the same story: crack noticed in year two, photographed in year three, mentioned to the builder in year four, worried about in year six, brought to a solicitor in year seven. Every step felt reasonable; collectively they donated the claim to the defendant. The correcting habit is mechanical: the season a defect appears, it gets written notification, photographs, and a limitation analysis — and where the picture justifies it, the expert report that starts the claims process while every option remains open.

The Parallel Clocks

Statutory limitation is only the outermost ring. Inside it: warranty scheme cover periods and notification deadlines; professional indemnity insurers’ claims-made mechanics behind negligent professionals; contractual notice provisions in formal building contracts. A competent first consultation maps all of them against your dates — which is why the consultation, not the monitoring, is the correct response to the first crack. If dates have already run long, come anyway: accrual analysis regularly finds live claims in files their owners had written off.