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

I thank Mr. Armstrong. I will now invite members to indicate to ask questions. I might go first.

I had hoped to ask the witnesses about planning of siting of buildings as well, but it is probably on me that guidance did not go to them. If they are happy to answer questions in that area, I certainly would facilitate that. From a climate point of view, it is critically important where we put buildings, which is a separate thing to how we build them, how we value the carbon in them and so on. If they have anything to say on it, I would appreciate it. However, if not, it might be something we return to.

With respect to the NZEB standard, it is good that we have it in place now and anything being built now is being built to that standard. From an operational point of view, they will be very low carbon. There is a question around the non-operational carbon, that is, the carbon that is entailed in the manufacture of the materials that go into buildings as well. It would be interesting to hear how the witnesses seek to capture that and mitigate carbon use in materials. It seems that we have a huge opportunity to move from a concrete-oriented construction sector to one that has much more timbre in it.

Sticking with the embodied carbon piece, there is also the existing building stock.

I would be interested in hearing the Department's representatives' thoughts on the creation of a system that values the carbon that is locked into the buildings we already have. Is the Department doing anything to introduce a system to allow us to determine the amount of carbon locked into a project proposed for demolition and whether that proposal makes sense in that light? If you pull that carbon into the equation, especially with regard to brand new buildings, it may not actually make sense to proceed. I am interested in whether the Department is doing any work in that area.

On building control, historically, we have not been very good at building control in this country, unlike in the UK where the local authority system is very strong on building control and where local authorities have very active building control offices that inspect buildings being built, are very involved from early on and ultimately assess what is built from a quality point of view. What is the Department doing to improve building control in this country?