Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I think there were only two stadia that were able to hold their own in terms of covering their costs, and the Shelbourne stadium was one of those. Do we agree to note the accounts? Is that agreed? Agreed. As usual, the listing of accounts and financial statements will be published as part of the minutes.

Moving to correspondence, as previously agreed, items that were not flagged for discussion for this meeting will continue to be dealt with in accordance with the proposed actions that have been circulated, and decisions taken by the committee in relation to correspondence are recorded in the minutes of the committee’s meetings and published on the committee’s web page. The first category of correspondence under which members have flagged items for discussion is B, correspondence from Accounting Officers and-or Ministers and follow-up to Committee of Public Accounts meetings.

No. 1079 PAC33 is correspondence from the Government accounting unit, Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, dated 16 February 2022. It encloses the minute of the Minister in relation to the committee’s reports on our examination of the 2019 appropriation accounts of the Department of Social Protection and the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. These are important items of correspondence as they are the formal responses to the committee’s recommendations. At our meeting last week, we agreed to note and publish this item and to hold it over for further consideration today. It has been flagged for discussion by Deputy Carthy.

This correspondence relates to the independent building standards regulator about which we made a recommendation. Our recommendation related to the impact the pyrite remediation scheme and defective concrete blocks grant scheme would have on the Exchequer. On page 3 of the response, it states, "However, it should be noted that any decision regarding the establishment of an independent building standards regulator will be a matter for Government and is likely to require primary legislation". I believe we should be getting something more concrete - pardon the pun - than that. It is either does or it does not. What would be the timeline for that? We could have done with a building standards regulator 50 year ago, never mind in recent times. One can see the significant exposure that exists by not dealing with those kinds of issues and preventing them from occurring. It becomes financially very expensive. This is very important and we should follow up on it.

Page 4 states, "As part of the Building Control Reform Agenda the National Building Control Management Project was created to provide oversight". I am not entirely sure what the purpose of that role is. Is it responsible for the regulation of building and construction products? Can we establish what the full remit of that project is? This may be a matter we can come back to. The first page states, "current expenditure on HAP and RAS is demand led". That may well be an matter we will come back to in the context of budgets.

If we are going to have a sizeable influx of people from Ukraine, I imagine those budgets will need some additional funds.