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

I will ask a follow-up question to the reply that the witnesses gave me. Some companies are providing good-quality products. Those products might not be CLT, but they are comparable to CLT in terms of what they do. These companies need capital investment, which Enterprise Ireland can provide. They also need to be able to secure orders so that they can build factories and scale up. However, accessing the public procurement system is difficult because they are new and innovative companies with a new product that does not necessarily have a history. How do we kick-start this? Should we be making a case for using the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF? Should we consider changing the procurement methodologies so as to score additional points to companies with lower carbon building products and so on?

I asked about buildings taller than 10 m. If we sought to move to fully timber buildings above 10 m – these would not be high-rise buildings, but mid-rise ones of six to eight storeys – what kinds of issue would we need to be considering from a fire safety point of view? Would we have to use double stairwells or mix concrete stairwells with CLT building frames? Is there a discussion around how we can ensure that such buildings are fully fire safety compliant?

I know what Mr. Barry and Ms Jammet want the Government and industry to do, but what are their proposals and ideas and what have they learned from other jurisdictions about how we can get them to do it? What positive incentives can be put into the system? When the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage appeared before us, the Chair shared my nervousness about how all of its focus was on working with the EU to agree the accounting methodology under the frameworks. However, it was less clear on how we would make the shift once all of those frameworks were in place, the products had certifications and we knew and agreed the volume of embodied carbon. Many vested interests in our building industry are wedded to the old dirty technologies. How do we move them on?

I will change my question to Mr. O'Connor because he gave some good answers to my previous one. Do we really need to import timber from Finland? It we want the lowest possible embodied carbon, we should be importing as little as possible. If there is an Irish company with comparable technology and working with the innovation centre, surely we should be encouraging it. The issue would then be one of how to scale that up and provide the construction industry security of supply over a ten-year period. Is that a conversation that is happening and to which the OPW is party? Is it something that could work?