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

I thank the witnesses for the presentation. I apologise in advance for stepping out of the meeting briefly. I have to introduce legislation in the House in the next 15 minutes, but I will come back as quickly as possible.

I thank the witnesses for the detailed briefing documents. There is certainly a kind of a logic to what is being proposed. I have four specific questions. One of the concerns, whenever these mergers happen and we hear talk of efficiency, is that sometimes efficiency does not necessarily mean improving the service but means reducing costs, particularly the cost of staff and overheads. As a consequence of the merger following the passing of this legislation, will the staffing levels remain the same as they are currently across the three agencies? Will they be reduced or increased?

With respect to efficiencies, one of the big problems with the land registry and one of the Property Registration Authority, PRA, functions, is that it can take up to 12 months to get documentation on the land registry updated. It is a very slow and sometimes difficult process, and that was before Covid. Are there plans, as part of this, to improve the efficiency of those front-facing services?

Similar to the issue of staff, I have a question on cost. Achieving efficiencies often means reducing financial costs. In terms of budgets, is there an expectation that the current expenditure, as per the Vote, will remain the same?

I will highlight something I think is odd in the Bill, although I appreciate it is not a function of the Department. It would have made eminent sense to roll a fourth agency, the Property Services Regulatory Authority, PSRA, into this new body. In fact, at an earlier stage I thought that was going to be the plan. I know the PSRA is a slightly different agency, but given that the new body will be the basket for property services and given that the PSRA, in my view, is in the wrong Department, which is one of the reasons it does not do some of the things it should do, was there any discussion with the Department of Justice about the possibility of putting this fourth property-related agency, albeit one that regulates private operators in terms of property services, under Tailte Éireann as well?