Mr. David Browne:

On behalf of the RIAI and my colleague, Mr. Pat Kirwan, I thank the committee for its kind invitation to us to present to it today.

I am an architect representing the RIAI. I am also a former president of the institute and a current director of RKD Architects, a large Dublin headquartered practice, which works on design, project management and sustainability across many types of building from commercial to industrial, university and residential, both in Ireland, throughout Europe, and elsewhere around the world.

The RIAI is committed to providing guidance and advice to architectural practices and practitioners with the aim of promoting high standards and high-quality design at the heart of the construction process, to facilitate a collaborative approach and to enable innovation in the built environment.

Business as usual in building design and construction will not sufficiently address the urgent challenges of climate change and Ireland's growing population and consequent housing crisis or the added difficulties of labour shortages and gender imbalance in the construction sector.

Embracing modern methods of construction, MMC, through a design for manufacture and assembly, DfMA, approach to design has the potential to help address many of these critical issues. DfMA and MMC, if adopted at scale in Ireland, can have an important role to play in meeting the targets of the national development plan, NDP, by helping to address current significant productivity, labour and skills challenges. It is important to understand that the application of DfMA and MMC in both the public and private sectors in Ireland cannot be achieved by the construction sector acting alone. MMC enabled by DfMA requires a profound change not only in the approach to design, manufacture and assembly but also fundamental change in the financing, bonding, insurance, procurement, contractual, technical standards, regulatory systems and approval processes that currently primarily support more traditional approaches to construction. Change will require input from the Government, private developers, manufacturers, the banking and insurance sectors, statutory authorities and Government agencies.

There is currently a low level of MMC manufacturing capacity in Ireland, particularly for volumetric modular construction. To enable establishment of MMC at scale, this shortfall could be addressed by the public and private sectors through incentivisation such as, first, the setting of mandated targets for the use of MMC in public sector building programmes to help establish a consistent level of demand. The second is to potentially provide annual unit requirement pipelines to be delivered through MMC across various sectors, both public and private, in particular in housing, education and healthcare.

These initiatives will take some time to establish and the sooner they are adopted, the sooner MMC can contribute at scale to the more productive and faster delivery of construction projects.

I will ask Mr. Kirwan to take over from here.