Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It seems like it was only a couple of weeks ago that Dr. Byrne and I spoke at a meeting of the Committee on Environment and Climate Action. The SEAI was thorough in its response to questions on the retrofitting grant. Dr. Byrne instilled a lot of confidence in members that it is being rolled out very well. It is important we have that confidence.

I do not know whether the witnesses watched or read the reports on our meeting earlier this week with the Irish Green Building Council and Dr. Kinnane from UCD, who I understand the SEAI has commissioned to do some research. Ms Josefina Lindblom of the Commission spoke to the committee on Tuesday. It was a very interesting three-hour session of good back and forth on a subject that was quite new to many of us. The reporting of it was quite unfair. I would not say what was reported was misreported, but the reports were perhaps incomplete and somewhat unbalanced. It would leave people with the impression the retrofit plan was not going well and there was not good auditing when in fact there is. The very reason Dr. Kinnane made these points was he had been commissioned by the SEAI in a very appropriate way to find out where the gaps are and to continuously improve the system.

Deputy Ó Broin referred to a big piece of the EPBD that is coming down the tracks, namely the life cycle cost analysis and the assess and report aspect. I understand 2030 is the year it will be introduced. I have a view that is something we should try to get ahead of and not wait. As Mr. Armstrong said, Ireland is an exemplar in the roll-out and implementation of the original EPBD and should get ahead of the recasting of the EPBD as soon as possible. Other countries are doing that.

In a committee meeting, there was frequent mention of the value of existing buildings, the importance of renovations and understanding the embodied carbon in existing buildings, some of which are 30 years old while others are 200 years old. There is a vast stock of buildings that have embodied carbon in them. Everybody here would agree we should do everything we can to address that. However, there seems to be a gap in our regulatory regime. It is perhaps easy to demolish buildings and build new ones on greenfield sites. It is a planning question. Is the Department considering regulatory steps to reduce the number of demolitions and building from scratch in the country? It is something we can address sooner rather than later. We do not need to wait to find out what the embodied carbon in all of these buildings is. We know this is the right thing to do. I ask Mr. Armstrong to be as brief as he can. I have one other question.