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

We do not know if contractors are compliant or not. I am not at all casting aspersions on any contractor but we simply do not know. The number of complaints and strike-offs on the registers of architects and chartered surveyors is tiny. In fact, when we did pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill in 2017 or 2018, the committee was surprised when we brought in representatives of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland and others to show us the extent to which the complaints procedure had operated.

There is also another big difference, and I think this a fair point to make. In the main, architects and surveyors did not leave the trail of destruction in our cities, towns and villages that a section of the construction industry did in the 1990s and 2000s. That is a fair point to make and we know that to be the case. There is a particular problem in sections of the CIF.

A lot of good work has been done, including by party colleagues of the Minister of State, in trying to clean up that industry and to improve the regulatory framework. Credit where credit is due. We are at a point where there are currently two working groups in the Department, one looking at a revised defective concrete blocks scheme, which is a slightly separate issue to this, but the other is looking at building defects, which is directly related to the Bill. There is a significant question mark over whether the industry should be allowed to regulate itself. First, that point must be made. I still have not heard the Minister of State say why he thinks this organisation is the right one. I hear him say the organisation needs to be competent, experienced and knowledgeable and I accept all of those points, but I have yet to hear somebody explain to me why the Construction Industry Federation itself would oversee it.

CIF does have a slightly different function in public policy from the two institutes the Minister of State mentioned; they are not primarily lobby organisations, they are primarily professional bodies that provide a host of supports and services to their members. In fact, they are often very reluctant to give their views on matters and are much more circumspect. We know, in particular under previous Governments but not under the current or previous Administration, the Construction Industry Federation was a semi-political body that in fact spent most of its time in direct political lobbying not the affairs of a professional body in the same way that those two other institutes are. I will not speak beyond this contribution, but I invite the Minister of State to say why in his opinion CIF is the best body and why the National Building Control Office is not an appropriate body for this purpose.