Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 5:

In page 10, to delete lines 12 to 26 and substitute the following: "(4) The Minister shall appoint the National Building Control Office as the registration body under subsection (2).".

This is probably one of the more important amendments that a number of us are tabling today. I know the Minister of State will not accept it but I will take the opportunity to at least explain to him why he should accept it so that it also is a matter that is on the Dáil record.

As the Minister of State will be aware, the purpose of this register is to have a statutory register of competence for construction industry professionals. The history of such a register is long. It was first proposed by the Law Reform Commission in 1977, a time when there was a significant concern among many people at poor quality building works. Unfortunately, the Government, not only of that day but for many decades afterwards, chose not to advance the idea of a statutory register. It was the death of Fiachra Daly, one of the owners of a property in Priory Hall, that provoked the then Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Mr. Phil Hogan, to take seriously the need to reform our building control system, and one of the measures was to revive the Law Reform Commission's proposal of 1977 to have a statutory register. The Law Reform Commission, in its wisdom, argued that register should be fully independent, importantly, of industry.

The relevant section of the Bill that my amendment relates to creates a situation where one, and only one, organisation can be the home of this register, that is, the Construction Industry Federation, CIF. It is not named in the Bill, which is particularly unusual, but all of the eligibility criteria, abstract and arbitrary as they are, point to that organisation and that organisation only. Of course, we know, because CIF currently manages the non-statutory register, that it will be the home.

This is in direct contravention of the recommendation of the Law Reform Commission. It is also in direct contravention of common sense. Given the fact that a small, but significant, number of construction industry professionals, as individuals and in companies, over a long period of time flagrantly breached building control regulations causing significant hardship, heartache, financial loss and, in the case of Ms Stephanie Meehan and her children, the loss of her partner and their father, Fiachra Daly, it is incredible that the Government would allow this register to be located in the Construction Industry Federation.

I have no problem with CIF. I engage with it all the time. It is an organisation that has an important role to play in the construction industry but it is a lobby organisation. Its job is to lobby for industry. Its job is to try to influence Government policy in the best interests of its members. It provides other functions but lobbying is its primary one. The idea that we will place a statutory register of competence of construction industry professionals in the same building with the same central telephone number and the same individuals, that the register is a place where individuals who may have complaints to make against the competence of those construction industry professionals make complaints and the staff who, as for other sections of the Bill, will investigate those complaints are all people from the Construction Industry Federation, and the board itself has a disproportionate number of members of the Construction Industry Federation beggars believe.

This amendment would place the responsibility for this register with the National Building Control Office, NBCO. That office was established also by the then Minister, Mr. Hogan, following the Priory Hall building control reforms, although only introduced much more recently. It is fully independent. It is made up of some of the country's leading building control professionals and experts. Ms Mairéad Phelan is the head of that body, and formerly was the head of building control in Fingal County Council. It has been tasked with the important job of helping cleaning up our building control system and I can think of no better organisation to place it into.

The Minister of State, Deputy Noonan's counterpart, the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, could not provide a single compelling reason this register should be in the hands of the Construction Industry Federation. There are some Chinese walls set up in the legislation in terms of the board. The legislation states the board must be independent etc., but if we are not only to clean up the building industry but to make it clear to the public that has happened, for public perception alone one would not locate this important statutory register within the Construction Industry Federation.

As I stated on Committee Stage, I suspect the only reason the Construction Industry Federation abandoned its long-standing opposition to this register - the CIF opposed it in the 1970s, in the 1980s and in the 1990s - and the only reason, I believe, it no longer opposes the register is because it is getting to hold and to manage it, and as we will see when we get to some other subsequent amendments of some importance, certainly, to some of us in opposition, the purpose, function and scope of the register, particularly in terms of dealing with building defects or suspected building defects is incredibly weak.

This is an amendment, as the Minister of State can probably hear from the tone of my voice, I feel strongly about. Like other Members who will speak, I have many years of experience of working directly with families - homeowners, private renters and social renters - who are today living in defective buildings and who, had a proper fully-independent statutory register been in place back then, would not be. That is why I want this legislation, which my party is supporting, to be the strongest, most robust and most effective protection against rogue builders and building contractors as possible and locating this register in the Construction Industry Federation is not the right thing to do. Therefore, I certainly will be pressing the amendment to ensure it is located in a fully independent body. I believe the National Building Control Office is the right place for it to be located.

See this speech in context