Mr. Aidan O'Connor:

That relates to the registration of professions. A limited number of professions are registered under the Building Control Act. Engineers are regulated under an engineering Act of 1969; therefore, they were registered beforehand. In terms of the registration of professionals, some of that followed from European directives. There was scope to register within the Building Control Act. I might add that that was before my time. They have been registered. A great deal of work went into that over a long period.

A number of options were offered to people not on the register. They could apply to be on the register of architects, building surveyors or engineers. They could apply to those institutes for membership, and quite a number of people have taken up that offer. Initially, their position was to question the reason they could not be recognised. Some were without training but became very technically proficient through experience. This is not a reflection on their proficiency; it is about having an identifiable form of competency. The issue is competency.

The architectural technicians and architectural technologists are not being excluded. They have options to make their application to one of those recognised bodies, and there are many routes they can take. They can go to an independent body such as UCD, which operates a professional course for registration, or register with the architect's, building control or engineer's institutes. Some of them have done that, and some of the people who met us-----