THIS is Eddie Doran – the man the Department of Fair Trading unkindly calls the Basil Fawlty of the building industry.

The 73-year-old Irish-born carpenter has been accused of building a Blue Mountains holiday house on the wrong site and facing the wrong direction.

The department's Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal found Mr Doran botched the dream holiday home of Alvaro Ramos, comparing him with John Cleese's hapless hotelier in the television series Fawlty Towers."

On his (the owner's) evidence, he was accommodating and forbearing of the gross gaffes of the builder on a scale approximating the way Sybil endured Basil in Fawlty Towers," a report by tribunal member Stephen Smith said.

The tribunal found that the windows were too small and the home's panoramic views were blocked by a misplaced beam.

The owner claimed that the kitchen was built with no room for a stove or fridge and defective glazing on the windows impaired the home's sweeping aspect.

"According to Mr Ramos . . . the dwelling was built in the wrong place, facing the wrong way, doors were put in the wrong position, structural members obscured the view, the kitchen was badly set out and not as ordered," the tribunal report said.

In its savage critique of Mr Doran's work, the tribunal found that the builder was "frequently out of his depth".

But Mr Doran, who was back on the job in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs yesterday, told The Daily Telegraph he had been unfairly targeted because he was Irish and vowed to take his case to the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal.

"It's pretty clear they're referring to O'Reilly the incompetent Irish builder in the report by raising the whole Fawlty Towers issue," he said.

In the hit show, O'Reilly the builder, played by Irish actor David Kelly, crashed into guests with planks of wood while carrying out repairs at Fawlty Towers.

Mr Doran rejected the tribunal's claim that he had built the house in the wrong place, saying the hilltop location had been settled by a professional surveyor.

Mr Doran said he had been forced to work in the cold and rain while he was building the property between 2002 and 2004 and had contracted pneumonia.

"I almost died when I was building the bloody thing, but they don't want to know about that, do they?" he said.

"These tribunal people are all civil servants – they wouldn't have swung a hammer in their entire lives."

Mr Doran said he began his apprenticeship as a stonemason under his grandfather at the age of 10 in County Wexford, Ireland.

"I have been in the building game for 63 years and I've built some beautiful homes with no complaints," Mr Doran said.

The tribunal ordered him to pay the owner $40,990.10 damages.

Asked yesterday if he would pay, he said: "No bloody way."

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,20953829-5007132,00.html