Ms Carole Pollard:

I aware of that. I am also aware of the mica situation in the Donegal-Mayo area and the difficulties experienced by people in that regard. The Deputy's question about who is and is not a builder is a very good one. It is an area where we need a very careful definition. As the Deputy said, there is a difference between main contractors and sub-contractors. As an architect, my employees come under my professional indemnity insurance that I hold for the practice. If one of my employees is signing off on the work, they must be a registered architect and comply with all the CPD requirements of that in terms of their experience, skills and knowledge and keep up to date. While a building contracting company may be a registered building company, there must be some way of identifying the persons within that company who hold the responsibility for signing off at the various stages.

Senator Murnane O'Connor asked how CPD is enforced. CPD is enforced by the registration body. If registered members are not complying with CPD, they come before the professional conduct committee, which can impose sanctions. In very severe scenarios, individuals could be struck off. CPD comes under the code of conduct. In our organisation, ethics come under the code of conduct and that is how they are dealt with. Everybody must follow the code of conduct. I agree that a publication of decisions needs to be done in a timely manner and be fully open and transparent.

I know the question about self-building was answered earlier so I do not want to rehash it too much. We need very strict restrictions around self-building which, again, are in the interests of the consumer. From what I have heard, people who engage a local person to build an extension or dwelling for them have run into incredible difficulties because in many of those instances, people are building those houses and extensions out of cash flow - cash or income coming in - and they get to the stage where they need to borrow money to complete the work. An area with which I am familiar where there are many unfinished dwellings results from the fact that people have gone to a lending institution to borrow money to complete a dwelling only to find that the lending institution will not lend them the money because they do not have appropriate professionals looking after their build. Those people have got themselves into a very difficult situation where they have expended a huge amount of money to get so far and cannot go any further. This is not necessarily because of anything bad; it results from a genuine belief that they were doing the right thing so there needs to be a very strong public information campaign by the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government to explain to the consumer in very clear and simple terms why BCAR is there and why these regulations are there. They are there to protect them. They are not there to cost money or be more onerous. They are there in the long run to make sure that people have houses that are worth the amount they spent on them and that they can sell on because everybody will need to sell their house at some stage. Not everybody passes down a house through a family forever. It is not down to lending institutions or a firm of solicitors to have control over halting a build because of lack of understanding of BCAR and its intention.