Dr. Oliver Kinnane:

I thank the Chairman for the compliment. I must pass the congratulations on to my research team, Mr. Richard O'Hegarty and Mr. Stephen Wall, who have worked very hard on the report and the model.

I totally agree with what Mr. Barry said. We are on a very worrying trajectory at present. We see it all over the city. To take an example of a local site, the old Passport Office building across the road was built in the 1980s and demolished only 30 years later. That building succeeded one built 50 years previously. We are getting this cycle of construction and demolition with shorter service life that could be down to 20 or 30 years in future. We just cannot afford to do that. There is no way we can. The embodied carbon of these buildings is significant. We are talking about a tonne of CO2 per metre squared of built floor area and these floor areas are getting bigger all the time. That is the other thing. If we look at the AIB site in Ballsbridge or anything like that, those buildings are increasing by multiples of up to four times the size of the original building. We need to assess whether that is necessary. To my mind, we need to legislate to stop unnecessary construction.

Certainly, the first step needs to be that we measure the embodied carbon of these kind of constructions. We also need to start measuring the sunk carbon. If a building exists on-site, how much carbon exists there? That should be accounted for in a carbon budget for development. Maybe that should be legislated for.