Mr. Pat Barry:

It is very important. Demolition is a no-brainer. We cannot afford to waste the sunk carbon that exists in our buildings. Throwing all of that to landfill rather than recycling or even upcycling it in any way and putting a new building with higher-embodied carbon materials than the original in its place is a totally unsustainable process. We need a moratorium on that. We need to move away from this idea that whatever money we have we just use for construction and keep constructing more and newer buildings all the time. It is totally out of sync with the aim of reducing our carbon emissions considering the amount of carbon that is involved in that process.

We have a section in the newest iteration of the report that will soon be published. Carbon emissions from public buildings are quite shocking for a much smaller set of buildings than the commercial or non-residential sector. We see almost the same amount of operational carbon emissions from public buildings excluding housing. The public sector has said it will lead on this through retrofit plans and it needs to. We recently went through what I know was an exceptional winter but on UCD campus the heating was up and all the windows were open for ventilation reasons. Again, it is the wrong decision.

On vacancy, I mentioned 1 megatonne. We will have updated values on that in the new report. If we retrofit, 1 megatonne is for 100,000 homes where we use an embodied carbon.

That is conservative, because it is estimated we have up to 180,000 vacant homes. It might not be possible to retrofit all of them, but even if it was possible to take 100,000 of those homes - and we are estimating 40% embodied carbon in this context, relative to the cost of new construction, which is an involved construction process - we are still saying it would be possible to shave 1 megatonne off the embodied carbon build of construction. If we are going to complete 400,000 homes, and we can do 100,000 of those by retrofitting properties now boarded up in the middle of run-down towns, that would be a win-win-win outcome across so many sectors of society.