Mr. Michael Lyons:

I thank Deputy Doherty. I can confirm it is not an outlier, unfortunately. There are 1,240 affiliated members in the fire safety division of Engineers Ireland. I would have regular contact with scores of different fire safety consultants and engineers. Practically everyone is telling me that since the beginning of this year their policy renewals have trebled or quadrupled, the excesses have increased significantly and all of the conditions attached to the polices have excluded various things.

For instance, one of the fire safety consultant firms came back and informed me that when it applied for its renewal, the first offer of renewal excluded fire safety construction, fire safety systems and any fire safety aspect of external walls. What that effectively meant was that the firm ceased being a fire safety consultant, which was its primary work. It went back and its broker did a lot of negotiating on its behalf. It ended up being offered a policy but the cost quadrupled from what it had been in 2020. That firm was allowed to do fire safety work even though external walls were excluded from its future works. The firm was happy with that because it was better that it was able to do the core part of its business, even though it was not going to be allowed to carry out its normal function on the fire safety aspects of external walls. That is a simple example that has been repeated in Waterford, Cork, Galway, Louth, Donegal and Dublin. The location makes no difference and the same story is being repeated throughout the country. The bite has occurred this year in particular.

It is also happening with structural engineers who are finding some of the same difficulties. In terms of fire safety work, practically everybody involved on a building site has a fire safety aspect of some type attached to their work. That includes mechanical and electrical engineers who are doing ducting for air conditioning, fire dampers and the like. There is always some aspect of their work that contains an element of fire safety.