Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I was coming to that point. It is important to state that there is responsibility in the Department because of the local authorities and the fire authorities. The Department is also responsible for the building regulations. One of the first things I did was to request all local authorities to carry out inspections of their multi-unit developments to make sure that life safety, being the first issue we have to be concerned about, was in place so that if there was an event, people could get out of the buildings alive.

The second thing I requested the fire authorities to do was to ensure that they were happy they had the resources to respond to an event of such scale if it were to happen. It has been confirmed to me that they have confidence in their ability to respond. We have also communicated with the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, and to all people under the RTB, about their responsibilities to ensure that life safety measures are in place. We have also used the people registered under the building control management system, BCMS, to make sure that they understand their responsibilities in this regard, that is 57,000 users and that work has been completed. That is the first piece we have to do here.

The second piece, which we are moving to now - it was always intended to be done in fairness to the Department - is inspections and considering how we now move, using the BCMS, to a risk -based model of inspection and what resources are necessary to do that. We are inspecting the riskiest buildings first and we know which buildings are involved. That is the work that I will embark on at the beginning of next week.

My first piece of work this week was to make sure about life safety measures and that is what we have been doing.