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

It is not about specific technologies. I accept and understand the argument that we must have an agreed methodology for calculating the volume of carbon in any particular building product. The reason we want to do that is then we will know that a certain product has lower carbon than another product. The next bit of work involves deciding how we make sure everybody uses this product. I do not care which product it is. For example, Deputy Mairéad Farrell and I met with the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform recently and discussed public procurement. I said that if they were agreeing their procurement rules for contractors delivering social housing, for example, once those frameworks Mr. Armstrong is talking about are agreed, we want to ensure that if I am putting in a tender for building 500 local authority homes and am using the lowest possible carbon building materials, I get an advantage in the tendering process because we want to ensure we are incentivising the lowest carbon building in public housing. I do not mean to be in any way harsh on Mr. Armstrong but along with that timeline that he rightly outlined must take place to agree those methodologies, certifications and frameworks, is the Department in parallel preparing to ensure that when all this is in place, that stuff is the stuff that gets used so that the social homes that are built in two years are near zero-carbon social homes? How we do ensure we do not just put PVA on them but that the embodied carbon is as low as possible because we know the building technologies are there and the certifications will be in?

That is really to do with the planning, building control and fire safety sections in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.