Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

I apologise. We have the Housing Finance Agency (Amendment) Bill 2025 before the Dáil, so we are trying to be in two places at once. At the beginning of the meeting, I recommended that the committee would write to the Minister for justice to do exactly as Deputy McAuliffe said to expedite the enabling legislation. It needs be done as a matter of urgency. For fear of asking questions that the witnesses have already addressed, I am going to move the debate on just slightly. I will read through the transcript of what I have missed.

A point I mentioned at the start is that we are beginning to see a new set of challenges in a lot of the new multi-unit developments. Thankfully, we are not seeing any evidence of defects. To be fair to Dublin City Council, it inspects 100% of all multi-unit developments as a self-imposed obligation, not as a requirement. If all the Dublin local authorities did the same, we would be in a much better position. However, there are challenges in multi-unit developments. The Cathaoirleach will know about this in Cork as well. For example, typically speaking in the Celtic tiger era when the estate was taken in charge all the car parking that was in the street was public car parking. We are now getting hybrid estates where because of the grant of planning permission portions of car parking spaces have allocated to the owners' management company, OMC, and portions will be public. Under the Multi-Unit Developments Act 2011, any changes to car parking policy do not have to be presented to an AGM for approval of the members. It is an operational decision of the directors and the managing agent. We are starting to see significant conflicts where policies have been changed. This affects the approved housing body sector. There is problem in Citywest. It is affecting two developments in my constituency. There is one provision in the Act that we need to clarify. This is what types of decisions should require a decision of an owners' management company AGM or EGM. It should not just be the budget. Any significant change into the operation of any the functions of the OMC should require a level of consent.

Likewise, I mentioned at the start that the threshold for the passing of an OMC budget is 25%. This is something I have only learned recently. To block a budget, there has to be 76% of the votes. I appreciate that getting the budgets through is tricky. I understand, particularly for folks who are on OMCs, and I know Mr. Lambe is a director of some, but we should be trying to move to a situation where there is an attempt to build consensus between the different players exactly as Clúid has been trying to do. Therefore, if there was a majority requirement of those in attendance at an OMC to pass a budget that would force earlier stage negotiations.