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

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. In yesterday's edition of The Guardian, there was a wonderful article about an apartment scheme in Barcelona called La Borda that has just won the Mies van der Rohe award for emerging architecture. I mention it because it will put the questions I have for the witnesses in context. It is a passive build powered with solar and fully timber, so it is not just a timber frame but the vast majority of materials in it are timber. Therefore, it is virtually zero carbon. The cost of living there is 35% below the market.

For those of us who have made it our business to go out and search for these kind of models over the last while, right across Europe we are seeing high-quality residential developments, including houses, duplexes and apartments, that are built to the highest possible energy efficiency standards with the lowest levels of embodied carbon, and they are significantly cheaper than what we are seeing in traditional builds here. At other committees meetings I have spoken about some projects I have seen in London local authorities where they are building timber frame and fully timber apartment developments and it is costing them about €1,000 less per square metre than a traditional build would. These are at the passive house plus standard with low, and in some cases no, embodied carbon. The reason I am mentioning all of that is that if all of this stuff is happening elsewhere, why are we not seeing more of it here? The reason we invited the organisations today is that many of us on the committee are aware of the good work they are doing. We are aware they have taken that work to a certain level but it seems to me that if we want to bring it to the next phase, whether it is some Irish architectural practice in a co-operative somewhere in Finglas, Ballymun or Clondalkin in my constituency, winning the next architectural prize, there needs to be a level of political acceleration of the advice the witnesses are here to give us. I ask the witnesses to be a little less diplomatic in their responses to the following questions on how we move this to the next level.

I refer to Enterprise Ireland. There are lots of companies already doing this technology in Ireland and when we talk to them they say they are frustrated about not being able to expand to the level of scale that is required to supply the Irish market. What needs to be done to assist these companies - in addition to the technology centre, which is vital - already producing the good quality material, to allow them to scale up and start supplying the Irish market at a level they currently cannot?

I will turn to Ms Phelan and the National Building Control Office. One of the big issues for building control is when we are using timber products there is that 10 m height restriction on residential developments. If we were to start to look at taller buildings and mid-rise, high-density apartment developments using a lot of this high-grade timber, what changes would we need to make to our building control and fire safety regulations to ensure we were not just building more environmentally sustainable buildings but that they also met the highest possible standards of fire safety and building control? We have a questionable history in some of these areas, so what would need to be done to ensure that if we are to use those technologies beyond 10 m in height it would be done in the safest possible way?

I will turn to Mr. Barry and Ms Jammet. I am taken by the call from Corinne Sawers and Eric Lonergan for supercharged incentives to get industry moving. When we spoke to the Department the other day it made a comparison with BER, which is great but it was slow and, as was said, we do not have that time. How do we supercharge industry? What kind of positive incentives can Government put into the marketplace to make sure people choose the lower carbon products over the dirtier ones? Do we need to also start thinking about timelines for phasing out high-carbon cement, concrete and other things?

I will put the difficult question to Mr. O'Connor because the State has to lead. If we are saying all this needs to be done, then every public building project should be at the cutting edge of this. How do we ensure that on State building projects, particularly public housing, because housing is the primary interest of this committee, including community centres and public libraries, the State is doing its best? The State must be leading the way and showing how high-quality, low-embodied carbon and cheaper to produce buildings can be built as we roll out the Government’s housing programme.

I will come back to some of those questions in the second round.