Orla Hegarty

speaker

79 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Sep

Orla Hegarty’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Today with David McCullagh · Beds in sheds - who will regulate building compliance? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

And the responsibility for both of those areas falls back on the homeowner.

And they're both subject to criminal prosecution if they don't comply with them.

And we haven't seen any information issued to people to help them through that process.

Well, specific examples.

For example, if somebody is going to have a couple of contractors on site, maybe one digging drains and putting in a foundation and another one coming in later and craning it in, the responsibility for putting in place health and safety appointments to make sure that process is done safely is on the homeowner.

Making them a project manager.

Effectively, putting them in a position of ensuring they employ competent people and that the competent people have access

in advance looked at the risks of this.

Obviously, if you're craning something over your neighbour's property and over the public street, you can see where there's risks.

But there's also risks later in the process.

So the planning rules say you can't build up to your boundary, that you have to stay back 60 centimetres from your boundary.

Now, that's just too narrow in terms of building regulations.

Under building regulations, you have to, if you're that close to a boundary, you can't have windows in it.

Now, the planning exemption says you can have windows 60 centimetres from the boundary, which is really narrow.

It's only the width of a

The problem with that is the planning exemption doesn't make clear to people that some of the things it's suggesting can't work under building control.

So you can't have any fire rated construction that closed, combustible construction that closed to a boundary.

And we can see that a lot of the units that are being sold to people

It can be an oil tank, it can be their extension, but you have to be very careful close to boundaries in terms of fire rated construction.

And that includes not having windows that open where fire can spread out through the windows, for example.

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