Francis Noel Duffy (Dublin South West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I want to make a few notes for the record because we are putting a report together. I have done research in recent years and I have been involved with Mr. O'Connor in that regard. The Forest Statistics Ireland 2018 report from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine shows that Ireland imported approximately 250,000 cubic metres of sawn timber per year between 2010 and 2017. In 2017, we exported 875,000 cubic metres, up from 658,000 cubic metres in 2010. We are set to double that figure. We export a hell of a lot more sawn timber than we import - three times the amount, in fact.

I travelled the country and talked to people in sawmills as part of an academic project intended to upskill students and encourage them into this sector. We can continue to ship our timber to the UK. That is where it is going The British are building timber-frame houses with it. One of the companies told me that Brexit will not effect that. The British have a hunger for our timber and will continue to use it. I do not know for how much that timber is being sold to the UK but we are exporting a lot more than we are importing and it is structural grade C16 timber, which is great for us.

In the context of embodied carbon, it is not just about the new building materials. This is something I learned from Mr. Barry and the Green Building Council. The London energy transformation initiative, LETI, refers to recycled materials which are brick skin. I have worked on projects where there is an internal timber skin and the external skin is brick. Going forward, the way LETI looks at it is that 80% of our materials need to be recycled. That means the industry will be using recycled brick and lime water that can be reused. That is a heavy embodied carbon material the first time around but that will not be the case if recycled brick is used the next time around. There might be some issues with using lime water.

There are companies using timber frames and constructing them off-site. Such frames are built to a higher level of precision in a factory and there are faster site times, which reduces costs. It is a very different method of construction. We are a wet trade country that uses blocks and mortar. The timber space means that builders get onto site quicker, which reduces costs. There are fewer people on-site and the number of accidents reduces. The research shows that using timber is better for the construction industry but the problem is trying to educate all of us to know how to use it, as Mr. O'Connor could tell us.