I have only been a Member of Dáil Éireann since December of last year. In the short time that I have been here, I have witnessed the Minister and his Department do things like this at the last minute, railroad them through without giving us, as Oireachtas Members, enough time to properly consider what the implications of these changes are. This is an entirely inappropriate way of doing what the Minister is trying to do. We had a briefing this afternoon. I am very grateful to the departmental officials for giving us that briefing at 3 p.m. because before 3 o'clock today, I was tearing my hair out on this. Tonight, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs will come in here, sit at their seats and push the button to vote for this, but they will not have a foggy notion what they are voting on. This is a fairly significant issue because we know where and how defective construction has got us into serious trouble in this country, both during the Celtic tiger and going way back as far as the seventies and the eighties. It is always the taxpayer who has to foot the bill for that. It is the taxpayer who will have to pay billions to remedy the apartment defects. We know the Minister is doing this because he essentially has to do it arising from the legal issues and the impending and existing court decisions. This should have been done as stand-alone legislation. That was the intention, as far as I had understood and as far as the Whips, certainly my party's Whip, had been informed. We are being asked tonight to sign off on something when we have not had detailed consideration of what has been proposed. We need to completely break the link between developers and the inspection process because the inspection process is not robust enough. This Bill was originally supposed to be about defective concrete, and that is what its primary function relates to. We have a motion to instruct tonight because we have a Bill that has literally been morphed into something entirely different. We should have had a revised explanatory memorandum for the entire Bill because these amendments are way outside the scope of the original Bill, which deals with defective concrete. We know we need to move on this, but this is not the correct way to go about it. I do not have sufficient clarity from what I have seen so far that this regularisation process is not going to be open to abuse from a minority, even though that is not the intention or practically how it will function. I was a bit concerned when we had the briefing earlier on and I found out that local authorities have not been consulted yet on this because we know local authorities have huge issues when it comes to staffing and resources which impacts in some cases their ability to carry out this work. We have issues which stem originally from the 1990 Act which places the primary responsibility on the builders and designers, and we have a culture there of non-compliance. We have had very few convictions under this and we have widespread issues. We are going through it in detail at the moment in relation to the defective apartments. While I understand why the Department is keen to take action on this, and I support the call for stronger building control, I cannot support this Bill this evening because I have not had sight of even a summary of any of the legal advice or any of the advice received from the Attorney General on this. While some of the measures are technical, there are more substantial changes to other sections of the Bill. It was a bad decision by Government to progress this in the manner it has. I do not have an issue in principle with the premise of stronger building regulation, but I have a huge issue with the rushed manner in which the Government is doing this. We know rushed legislation makes for bad legislation. I urge the Government to withdraw these amendments and come back in the new year with a stand-alone piece of legislation so we can actually tease these issues out properly. We really need to discuss this at committee level. We need to hear from relevant building control witnesses because this is too serious to get wrong. We have been here before regarding shoddy building standards and we are all paying the price for it. When we talk on the original premise of the Bill in relation to defective concrete, notwithstanding the huge emotional, psychological and physical effect it is having on the people affected, I am very conscious that it is all of us who are paying for those mistakes through that culture of non-compliance and through the levy on concrete. In principle, the Minister is effectively guillotining this legislation and he is effectively guillotining our ability to have a meaningful impact on it and go through the actual cause and effect of what the Government is proposing. The Minister really needs to rethink this.

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