Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I say that with affection and in jest but the Minister knows what I am trying to say.

The next section deals with registration of the title. It is clear from my reading of it but I welcome the way in which the Minister has separated the three titles. I assume the establishment of one, after the Bill is enacted and signed by the President, is not dependent on the second or third and that they can operate separately. Either in his response or on Committee Stage the Minister might indicate, particularly for quantity surveyors and building surveyors, if the Society of Chartered Surveyors will be able to share some overheads in respect of the operation to minimise the bureaucracy associated with it.

I welcome the different qualifications concerning the register. There is standard recognition of the various qualifying colleges. There is also the grandfather clause, as it has been called, and the list of people who were accepted by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government by one of the Minister's predecessors in respect of those deemed to be eligible to qualify, all of whom I presume, upon the enactment of this legislation, will automatically be deemed to qualify and can proceed. In speaking to John Graby, the director of the RIAI, this morning, I understand it in turn is ready to proceed immediately once the Bill is enacted.

I want to put two issues to the Minister for consideration which we might tease out on Committee Stage. I know the convention of our legislative system is to be prescriptive in defining the various institutions that produce qualified architects but we might need to examine some kind of enabling provision as a catch-all to give some flexibility in recognising standards rather than being as rigid as we are currently. Deputy O'Dowd's point was well made. There are many ways of getting to the top of a particular professional or academic mountain. It does not always have to be immersion in a three year and then a five year course. We should be as flexible as we can because we need that flexibility. The market and the industry need it and we also need to be able to examine qualifications from outside the European Union, the EEA area and the Swiss Confederation. These are details we can tease out on Committee Stage but out of courtesy I signal to the Minister and his colleagues that these are areas for which I would like some advance preparation, that is, flexibility in how we specify bodies that award qualifications to enable people be registered with the title "architect" and, by extension, "building surveyor" and "chartered quantity surveyor".

Deputy O'Dowd said the architect profession was seeking to have this issue addressed for some time. One of the factors that stopped it being addressed was a Progressive Democrats obsession with competition. In the former Department of Industry and Commerce, I remember the late Niall Montgomery, who was at one stage president of the Institute of Architects of Ireland, asking the then Minister, Justin Keating, which shows all our colours and age, in 1973 or 1977 if it would be possible to introduce registration for the protection of the title of architect. The ethos of that Department — which held sway until recent times — was that it would be anti-competitive. I am glad that this has been rebutted and that——

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