Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witness for their presentations. I know it is not the first time that some of them have appeared before the committee on this issue. This is one of those areas where the more we can advance and accelerate the high-quality, cutting-edge technologies in particular, the better. Not all 1960s system builds were bad. In fact, in many cases the systems were good but the maintenance of them over periods of time was poor, which led to many difficulties. However, there is a sense of frustration and my questions are really about, from all the witnesses' different organisational perspectives, what is it that we and the Government need to do to try to accelerate the good products the witnesses are all working with and describing. We have seven years to meet a very significant emissions reduction target in the built environment, including our embodied carbon. We are way behind on that. From previous sessions with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage we have learned that the preparations for things like measuring embodied carbon in building products in a standardised way so that it can be processed in the system is some time off. In other jurisdictions, such as in London, some of the Scandinavian countries and Poland, they are way ahead of us in the sense that they have managed, both through the public and private sectors, to support companies with state-of-the-art building technology at scale, creating good quality jobs and not only delivering really good quality homes at a lower price per square metre in some cases and faster but also doing so with much reduced carbon. Many of us here are really keen to know from the witnesses' expert views what is it that needs to happen now to see more of this in Ireland.

I have some specific questions for anyone who wants to answer. Timber frame is not a modern method of construction. It is one of the things that often frustrates me that it has been around for many decades and yet only 25% of our new-build homes are using what is quite an outdated method of construction. How do we go from 25% to a much higher figure, and that is just on the frame? Given that 20% or 25% of our new-build homes are one-offs, many of the homes in between are built by small and medium-size builders and then we have the big manufacturers, who are essentially using a lot of this technology anyway. How do we get more of that good technology used but also into all of the different areas of the industry?

Sometimes the problem is not the technology but the assembly on site. I will not ask any of the witnesses to comment on Dublin City Council's recent difficulties with one building contractor and one new building technology, but it does show you can have a really good product, but if the training of the workforce is not correct, then difficulties can arise. Thankfully, Dublin City Council's architects' department and building control section caught the issue and it has been rectified, but at considerable cost. How do we also make sure not only that we get more of those products into the building system but also that our construction workers are fully trained up to do all of that?

I do not imply any criticism with my next question because I do not underestimate in any way the huge challenges. We need to learn more from the slowness. The previous time we spoke about modular accommodation for Ukrainian refugees, there was a hope that some of that product would have been on site last year. I accept that some of the sites were super-tricky, but not all of them have those same problems either in terms of local dynamics or site abnormalities. Again, are there other lessons we could take from that?

Accepting that we have to use more of this low-carbon technology, what would be the one or two key recommendations to Government the witnesses would have that we could include, for example, in our communications and correspondence with it?

We need to start having incentives and phase-out timelines for the good and bad technologies. For example, low-carbon cement is already available at the same price as high-carbon cement, and we know the value of timber when it is used properly. What are the one or two key drivers that would allow us accelerate the use of these technologies in a way that produces very good-quality homes without diminishing standards in any way? I will open that up to go around the houses, if that is okay.