People Before Profit has called for a levy to be imposed on developers and the property industry to help pay for the costs of remediating defective apartments.
It comes as the Cabinet approved a "fully-funded" scheme to repair up to 100,000 homes with building defects.
Minister for Housing Darragh O'Brien said remediation work already completed, or currently under way, on apartments and duplexes will be covered by the scheme.
The minister said the cost of the scheme could run to €2.5 billion and will cover 100% of costs.
Speaking after the scheme was announced, PBP's Richard Boyd Barrett said that should "not be a block on the State guaranteeing full remediation and full retrospection for the tens of thousands of people whose homes are defective form fire safety or water egress"
He said the State scheme announced this morning "must guarantee 100% redress for impacted apartment owners."
Deputy Boyd-Barrett said this is the consequence of "cowboy builders who were allowed run riot because of light touch regulation brought in by successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael governments."
Pat Montague from the Construction Defects Alliance - a lobby group which represents homeowners affected by defects - described the scheme as a "welcome and significant step forward", but said there is still a lot of detail to be worked out.
Speaking on RTÉ's News At One, he welcomed that the Government has now made a decision to set up a remediation support scheme.
"Given that only until a few months ago, the official line from Government was that this was a private matter for apartment owners and basically effectively told them to get lost and look after the cost themselves, the fact that the Government is setting up a scheme is a big move forward."
He said the other key part is that the Government has also agreed in principle to cover the costs that have already been paid out by apartment owners.
Mr Montague said it is not clear to him whether payments to individual home owners will be capped in any way.
He said most of the payments in the first instance will not be going to home owners. They will be going to homeowners' management companies because they are the bodies with legal responsibility to ensure safety in apartment development.
Mr Montague said 70% of apartments built during the time in question are affected by fire safety defects, which he said is just short of 90,000 apartments.
Earlier, Eamon O'Boyle, Fire Safety Consultant at Eamon O'Boyle Associates and former assistant chief fire officer with Dublin Fire Brigade, said there is a "huge amount" of defective apartments and he expects there are issues with hospitals, hotels and nursing homes as well.
Speaking on RTÉ's Today with Claire Byrne, he said a lot of buildings had no cavity barriers so that if a fire were to break out in one apartment, the smoke would travel through that cavity and into other apartments.
"There are barriers put into these to prevent that happening and that's one of the things that's missing in many of the apartments... and it's a very difficult thing to remediate".
