Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank Dr. Lindblom for her statement. There were some very interesting points. We will go to questions and answers. We are limited to three hours for this meeting. I propose that members take two minutes to ask their questions and we will give latitude to our guests to answer them, taking as much time as they need, within reason. Is that agreed? Agreed. I ask members to raise their hands to indicate they wish to speak. Some have already done so.

I was heartened to hear Dr. Lindblom speak about the energy performance of buildings directive, EPBD. The original EPBD drove much of the change we have already seen in this country. The new EPBD sounds as though it will take us further in the right direction. I wonder about the timeline in that regard and about other member states.

It sounds like some member states are well ahead of us. Perhaps Mr. Barry, Ms Jammet or Dr. Kinnane will speak about the Irish context. What can Ireland do in the near term to get up to speed with the general direction of the energy performance of buildings directive, EPBD? I am aware of a project in Limerick that I think utterly farcical. It is proposed to knock a public building and move all the staff into a brand new shiny building across the road. It makes absolutely no sense that we are not renovating the existing building because if we did so, we would not need to build the expensive, shiny building across the road. This kind of thing is going on in Ireland. It seems from our guests' opening statements that we are way behind with respect to valuing embodied emissions. This committee has done a lot of work on climate-related legislation in the past two years but has not looked at embodied emissions and instead focused on the operational side. It seems that if we did not do anything, we could theoretically meet our carbon reduction goals while still having very significant levels of embodied emissions associated with the built environment sector in Ireland. Perhaps our guests would speak about where Ireland is at in that regard and to where we need to get. I know our guests touched on many of the relevant points in their detailed opening statements. How quickly can we implement important reform in this area?