Mr. Maurice Buckley:

I will say it anyway because it is correct. Despite the efforts of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, the new standard is still not widely accepted and used in the Irish market. It takes a long time because long negotiations, long leases etc. are being dealt with. The OPW has the attitude of being once bitten twice shy and is very much on top of this issue but in the wider property market in Dublin and Ireland I would say that it is still causing confusion left, right and centre.

To finish the point I was making, I am not a property expert but my colleagues are and I would have thought that the square metres should be constant because a building is a building but it actually changes from what is measured in the drawing to what is finally measured on site. That measurement only took place in December 2016. All of this dialogue and querying between my staff and the CSSO had already happened and then the measurement took place and there was a difference between the physical measurement and the drawing measurement of about 3.5% in area, as happens sometimes, on the old standard. We are used to dealing with that standard and it was negotiated through.

At the same time, the same measurement specialist measured the building under the international property measurement standard, IPMS 3. Normally, we would not expect a modern open-plan office block to be much different. Normally, it would be negligible but in this case because it was a renovated building it was actually quite significant. It was in the order of 3% to 4%. That is the point at which this went astray.