Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am glad we have a chance to discuss this matter again. We have had a few briefing sessions with our departmental officials on the matter, and the Deputy has probably had much discussion with Seán Armstrong, who is one of our leading people in this area. There is a commitment within the Department to work in this area. As the Deputy will know, we are involved in an EU working group, which is probably the key one dealing with embodied carbon in construction materials and the whole life-cycle cost of construction. We are not prepared to go ahead of the working group with the issue and we want to work with it on that because it affects construction products, the regulations around them and the availability of products and materials for sale in this country and at European level.

That is where we want to concentrate our work, working at European level and pushing the agenda to go far with it. We will be in a place to make changes to embodied carbon and construction material regulations in line with our European colleagues. While I do not know how long that will take, I believe that the working group is quite busy with the matter and meets regularly, so we should see a harmonised procedure to move on in this space over the next year or two, or perhaps even before that. The Deputy rightly recognised we have made many changes to the building regulations in recent years, as we discussed earlier, but we brought the sector with us on that journey. There has been much consultation to reach where we are today with NZEB, and it did not happen overnight.

It does have an impact on the cost of housing construction and all involved in the sector. We now need to invest a lot of money. A number of contributors referred to training and apprenticeships. There is a lot of potential associated with our new housing and planning regulations, the new NZEB targets and the retrofit program. We need to focus our resources on these to bring with us all those involved in the construction sector overall. It is not just a matter of having regulations but of developing the real culture behind them. The Deputy is coming from a perspective that acknowledges that we must think through the whole process and have everybody included. That comes with good regulations. Three or four Governments have been made many changes over the years at a reasonable pace, and we are prepared to make more in conjunction with our European colleagues when it comes to the products. I believe we are on the path on which the Deputy wants us. I am aware he has been involved in consultation, and I look forward to continuing the conversation with him whether we are in opposition or government, or working together or on opposite sides of the House. Most Deputies accept the changes we have to make when it comes to the built environment. That is what we have made progress on, with the support of all parties in this House, over recent years.

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