Ulick Burke (Galway East, Fine Gael)

I welcome this comprehensive Bill which is ambitious in so far as its sets out to control and supervise persons involved in property services and to improve standards. The vast majority of those engaged in the property industry such as estate agents and auctioneers and others who provided services were reputable and carried out their work in a professional way but, at the same time, others got involved when it was profitable and lucrative to do so and they generated a lucrative income. I would like to highlight the need for transparency, which is provided for in the legislation.

Everyone knows that in the past irregularities occurred in private treaty sales. Purchasers were misled in many instances and they had to pay much higher prices. This applied not only to homes, but also to land, leases and rental accommodation. I welcome very much the fact that we will have transparency. However, I must question how this will be guaranteed. The Minister will establish the authority and an appeals mechanism will be established but he must give a forceful indication that past practices will be consigned to history and will never happen again. A few years ago, gazumping was an issue. What happened in those cases? If one went into an auctioneer to purchase a property and asked for a day or a week to consider buying it, sometimes within hours, not days or weeks, the price had increased without any justification. It was unfair to many young people and that is why many young couples have mortgages they are unable to afford. They are having to default, which is a terrible tragedy. The finger of blame must be pointed at auctioneers and estate agents, particularly for their role in the early part of the boom in the construction industry. I hope the Minister will clearly identify this issue and insist that the authority makes all transactions transparent.

Departments are also to blame. Two years ago I identified a scandal in which the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food had been knowingly ripped off on a lease in Galway for an office block to deliver services to farmers in the west. It has taken me the best part of two years to get 60% of the story through parliamentary questions. It is like torture extracting information about whether the need for a premises was advertised by the Department and whether there was a fair competition among all those who had premises to lease or if it was an insider job. I am beginning to believe it was, having seen the names of the owners of the office block that is being used. One of them works for Anglo Irish Bank and the other for Allied Irish Banks. To add insult to injury, as Deputy Nolan said, they were retrospectively granted another two years on the lease, which is unbelievable. Given the times we were living in, that may have worked but, sadly, the amount wasted by the Department in acquiring that property was unbelievable. It acquired facilities far in excess of its needs and that should not have happened. I hope the Minister of State will bring this to the attention of the Minister for Justice and Law Reform to ensure a similar scenario does not arise again. Other new office blocks were available and the Department was ripped off in this instance. There was no transparency, sadly, even on the part of the Department. It is one thing for auctioneers and estate agents to conceal details but I have not been able to find out whether the lease was advertised or if an open competition took place. There has been no indication that it was open and I have never been granted information in this regard.

The Bill intends to provide for a central body to control and supervise the industry. I do not know where it will be located but, initially, the authority will comprise 11 members, some of whom will work part-time. At this stage, I would have expected us to have moved on from the days when a Minister made all the appointments to such a body. This authority will probably be one of most important established this decade, given its responsibilities following what happened with regard to property sales. The Minister says the authority will be independent and I will take his word for it, but if he appoints all the members based on their experience, education and qualifications, he will leave the door open to criticism about its independence. How independent can an authority be? I do not know how the Minister can justify the authority and the appeals mechanism. Who will be appointed to oversee the appeals mechanism? How independent will they be?

There is an appeals mechanism in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and when people are not satisfied with the outcome of an appeal, they then take their case to other departmental officials. How can an official be expected to give a biased decision against one of his own colleagues? That does not happen and that is why the appeals mechanism provided for in this legislation must be independent and it must have the teeth and power to make decisions, irrespective of the membership of the authority since their decisions will be under appeal.

It is important there be a change from the old mechanism of granting auctioneering licences and estate agents' licences. Any person who has been in court on the day auctioneering licences have been renewed would be aware that luckily officials from the Revenue Commissioners would be present to provide information that the applicant seeking a licence renewal was held in good financial standing at that given time and then the solicitor representing the applicant would deliver further information to the court. It seems the process was a rubber-stamp exercise. With no disrespect to the courts, many applicants got through the net in those instances who because of their previous records should not have gotten through. There was no authority in place to monitor standards and decide that X, Y or Z was not entitled to a licence. I do not know the number of licence applications by auctioneers and others that have been refused by the courts other than in circumstances where outrageous decisions were made by those people.

Now that the Minister has arrived, I note he proposes to appoint 11 members to the authority and that he will select them. I presume he will do so on the basis of experience. Will those people be required to be dissociated or not tied in any way to auctioneering businesses or to the sales area? People in many of the agencies in this area previously would have been closely identified with the auctioneering business; I refer to people the Minister could identify in this respect but I am not saying he identified them in the past. It is important the Minister dissociates himself from that and gets the best professional people available who can make judgments, supervise and exercise control over auctioneers applying for licences. It is important that licences be granted by the authority.

I was surprised to learn that an interim body which does not have statutory powers has been in place. Will the Minister advise the House what work it has done to date? Did it monitor, supervise or control any aspect of the auctioneering business and the people and companies involved in it?

A difficulty has arisen in terms of what management boards are doing in certain areas. It is regrettable that many local authorities throughout the country for some reason best known to themselves, by accident or design, included in planning housing estates in small villages and towns, which proliferated throughout the country, as being under the remit of management bodies. Certainly in rural areas that has led to the collapse of sales. A purchaser would have approached an auctioneer and agreed a house sale and that case was then passed to the solicitor to deal with the legal end of transaction, but the solicitor would have immediately said "stop the lights" that he or she could not proceed with it because of the existence of the management company. Whether the management company represented the developer or a voluntary group, it did not make any difference to the purchaser but the fact that it was in place and was unnecessary led to the failure of many sales. Serious opposition to such management companies has been expressed by purchasers within an estate who did not want to be part of this set up because of the difficulties involved in it and no benefits derived from being part of it for the tenants or purchasers of houses in an estate, a flat complex or commercial premises.

Where management companies were in place in areas where commercial premises in County Galway were flooded during the bad weather last November and December, such companies could not be activated; they took no responsibility for the damage done in the first instance or for the fact that flooding occurred and damage was done to premises, property and installations and appliances within offices. That happened extensively and one would have to ask what is the role of such management companies. When the Minister next examines the Bill I hope he will note that some management groups and companies that were put in place may have been inadvertently included by planners not realising the outcome of their inclusion at a later date. I hope he will review that with a view to releasing or lifting such provision where it is agreed by the developer and or the tenants and purchasers of properties.

I welcome the Bill and what it seeks to achieve. Why is it the Minister's intention, by regulation, to stagger the implementation of the measures covering issues in the Bill? Why are all the measures not being included on a one-off basis? Has the Minister decided where the authority will be based? If it is to be based in a central location, how does he expect it to exercise control over and give advice to auctioneers as far north as Donegal and as far south as Kerry and to those located in places in between?

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