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

We have spoken about cross-laminated timber. There are Irish companies which have developed their own products that are fully timber with low-carbon based insulation. Lidan in County Roscommon, for example, has a very good product. It has been used by the Department of Education and some local authorities, as well as the private sector. It is just one of a number of companies. Their problem is they have all the same constraints as the others. I have a couple of observations and then some questions.

Standardisation is not a new thing. Sometimes when we have these debates we forget this. All of the old Bord na Móna houses, the Irish Glass Bottle houses and the 1960s corporation estates look the same everywhere. We have two 1960s corporation estates in Clondalkin, where I live. You would pay €400,000 for one of those homes now. The Irish Glass Bottle houses in Templeogue now cost €600,000. These were really well-built standardised products. It is important to remind people that some of the best housing we ever built, particularly the best public housing, was standardised and there was nothing wrong with it. On the fire safety issue it is important to send clear signals to the public. I spoke to senior fire safety and building control officials, who told me that of course we can go up to 20 m with a fully timber product. You may need a concrete core, as Mr. Downey has said. If you go above 20 m, you may need sprinkler systems as are now being installed in apartments. There are fire safety solutions, which our own building control and fire safety professionals know about or advocate for. You can therefore have both lower carbon timber and the highest possible fire safety. Some recent battles the fire brigade has had over complex buildings show the solutions provided through sprinkler systems and other things. On the mandates, I think of this slightly differently. Public procurement should positively incentivise the best possible products. It should therefore say, in the procurement scoring matrix, that the lower the carbon in the products, the higher the matrix and the higher the likelihood a particular company will get the tender. That way a clear signal is being sent to the market that this is the direction of travel. Mr. Downey is also right that multi-annual framework agreements provide that certainty. You know you will have a pipeline of work. It is also more cost-effective for the State. We should be doing it with all public procurement works, but particularly for this. It picks up on what Mr. Searson is saying about knowing you are in a five-year multi-annual framework agreement that guarantees a certain number of units per year, and is expanding each year. There will be 500 units in the first year, 1,000 the next year and 1,500 the year after. We can start to move from the 700 units that have been done, albeit at 44 sq. m for the Office of Public Works and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, to 1,000 or 2,000 two-storey units of 90 sq. m.

There are smart ways to use public procurement positive incentives and multiannual framework agreements. The committee should consider mandates in the area of low-carbon cement. We do not require our utility companies such as Irish Water or the ESB to choose low-carbon cement, whereas if they knew they had to go from 10% to 20% to 40% to 80% lower carbon cement each year, it would not only send a signal to them, but, as Mr. Downey stated, because they have to work with industry, it would also send a signal to industry that over a period of time, it will become increasingly difficult to use higher carbon cement. We will always have to use higher carbon cement in certain types of projects. There are ways of designing these systems that incentivise positive behaviour and send market signals that things are changing. The challenge is to reach 40% embodied carbon in the built environment by 2030. We are all talking in the same area about the kinds of things we would like to see. We all know the challenges and difficulties. We also know that those emissions reduction targets are not optional. They are legally binding and significant fines will be imposed on the State and the taxpayer if we do not meet them. This is not the silver bullet question. Will the witnesses give us a few key requests? If we wanted to be ambitious, not just nudge the thing along, but to have any chance of meeting the 2030 target, especially in public residential housing in which the State has more levers, what would be the ambitious requests the witnesses would make of a government that was serious about doing some of this?

Much of that is on a large scale. I want to come back to Ms McManus and Mr. Stevens as regards small-scale stuff. I like the fact that we have a lot of SME builders and communities that want affordable housing projects. What will work for the big stuff will not work to incentivise the small stuff. What changes need to be in place to allow it happen at the scale JFOC Architects is working at, as well as at the scale companies such as Cairn, Glenveigh, South Dublin County Council or Dublin City Council are working at? What should our ambition be? What should we do?