Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North-West, Fianna Fail)

Mr. Lambe has jumped ahead of me. It is difficult to see any other situation where such significant amounts of money would be distributed, albeit with protections, and I accept there will be protections in the apartment defects systems, to a sector where serious reforms are required. I would be saying to the Department of justice that if it leaves this on its desk for too long, we will be putting the blame on its desk when things go wrong. There is cross-party consensus, and certainly consensus on the backbenches of Fianna Fáil, that it should be moved to the Department of housing because there is an appetite in that Department, for all the reasons we have just described, to deliver some of these reforms. Given that I have two party colleagues leading those Departments, I will do everything in my power to try to persuade both of them to make sure the bureaucracy and red tape do not get in the way here. Aside from the public spending element, which I have put to the witnesses, at the heart of all of this are people and where they live.

I recently had a serious meeting with residents who are in a management company in which the basics of how an OMC should be run were not operating. There was not even a basic level of knowledge among the people living there. In many ways, that was no fault of their own. The only way for them to effectively succeed would be to do a corporate takeover of the OMC. That could lead to all of the issues we spoke about around differences with neighbours and so on.

I am particularly conscious of OMCs that are made up of apartment and non-apartment developments. That is one area of real conflict that I can see. In essence, many apartment-based OMCs use fees gathered from non-apartment elements to fund the overall development. I appreciate that is difficult to unravel. It is not an easy thing to say but when people sign a contract when they buy a house, they are then bound by the OMC. People can be effectively locked into a tyranny of the majority, however, and there can be unfairness in that.