Ms Bernadette Egan:

The overarching principle is one of human rights and equality for everyone in Ireland and to be treated on an equal basis with each other. To get back to Deputy Hourigan on a stand-alone body for building regulations, in many countries there is a department of the built environment that has a lot of remit over monitoring accessibility, building regulations and the intertwinedness of each of the building regulations, and how equality is achieved from that. We are concentrating a lot on building regulations in this meeting, but there is also other equality legislation such as the Equal Status Acts.

There is also an onus on people to have accessible buildings. It is not just about an end product with the building regulations. One of the points I have made is that it is very important that we have one set of guidelines. At the moment there are a lot of guidelines, including the IWA and various others. There is Part M and various other things. As designers and architects, it is difficult to find one's way in that mist. There are a lot of good documents, but none of that is legally enforceable except Part M which is the benchmark that, unfortunately, a lot of people have to design to.

In revising anything it is important that everything is looked at in a holistic manner and that there is one clear set of guidelines. Otherwise, everything gets lost in translation and things will not happen. As Mr. Cunningham said, there are different levels of universal design. It is quite complicated in some ways, but in another way it is not. It is about achieving human rights.