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

I am sure that the Minister of State will be relieved to know that I will not rerun either the Second Stage debate or the considerable committee deliberations that we had. I want to briefly put on record my strong opposition to the appointment of the Construction Industry Federation as the registered body.

To be clear, I fully support the need for the register. As the register is a good thing, it is better to have a weak register than no register at all. It is significant that it has taken 45 years to get us this far. The Law Reform Commission first urged the creation of a register in 1977 but the suggestion was ignored for many years by subsequent Governments, partly because of the strong opposition of the Construction Industry Federation. It was 2014 before the Government committed to the creation of the register. It is exactly as the Minister of State said, it was his predecessor, Phil Hogan, who included it as part of his post-Priory Hall reforms. While I have no evidence to support what I am about to say, it is my strong suspicion that somewhere along the line in negotiations between the Construction Industry Federation and a Government, the way that this register was got over the line was that it would be located in the Construction Industry Federation rather than any fully independent body.

I do not accept the comparisons with the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland and the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland. It is not that I necessarily favour the form of self-regulation they are involved in but given everything that we know about the scale and depth of the Celtic tiger-era building defects, it seems to me the very last organisation in which we should locate the register is the Construction Industry Federation. I engage with CIF regularly, it has a series of functions and I do not disregard or disrespect that but having a register is both about the register doing the right thing and it being seen to do the right thing. Again, I emphasise that I think the Government is making a mistake here.

I remind the Minister of State that I think the legislation is weak. The limited functions of the registration body are problematic as it will give an exceptionally limited form of consumer protection and, again, he knows my views on all of that. Therefore, I cannot support the appointment of CIF as the registration body.

We were always going to end up here and this was always the intention. I fully understand and respect that but nothing that I have heard in the course of debates on Second Stage or in committee has altered that. It may be that a future Government will be obliged to amend the legislation both to give those people who purchased homes real consumer protection and real safeguards against shoddy practices and to appoint a truly independent body, which I believe should be a building control and consumer protection authority, the nucleus of which is currently the National Building Control and Market Surveillance Office. My view today is the same as it was when we first debated this matter.