Mr. Derek Rafferty:

In the discussions and consultations on revising the scheme, one of the issues that came up was this was a financial burden, as well as everything else, on homeowners. It was felt it was better to manage that centrally and the Housing Agency was brought in to do that as part of its role. What would happen then of course is we would have had a number, probably a few hundred, who would already have had these reports done by their own engineer. My understanding is that especially in Donegal there were hundreds of these the council had not made a decision on. As part of the transitional arrangements to the new scheme, the Housing Agency made that decision. The agency had then engaged at that point its own engineers and reviewed those engineering reports from the homeowners' engineers and made a call on that at that point. That is a technical issue I cannot comment on. The professional engineers may have a difference of opinion and on occasion it appears as if they did. The Housing Agency engineer made that call. I do not have any more specifics than that, but that is what happened, effectively.