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

As the Minister knows, much of the debate about our 2030 and 2050 emissions targets has focused on energy, transport and agriculture. I would like to shift the focus to the built environment. Approximately 30% of our emissions come from the built environment, 20% from operational emissions relating to energy use and efficiency, and approximately 10% from the embodied carbon and materials used in the building of new infrastructure, homes, roads, schools, hospitals and so on. My colleague, Deputy O'Rourke, earlier outlined our support for an ambitious, just retrofitting plan, and his concerns with respect to the plan presented by Government. Even if the Government meets all of its targets, while operational emissions in the built environment will reduce, under the NDP, embodied carbon emissions are likely to increase unless we take significant action. Last year, the Irish Green Building Council published a good report that outlined many pathways to reduce embodied emissions. Both the Minister and this side of the House would fully agree on their implementation. If we are serious about reducing embodied carbon, then we have to accept that whatever we build in the future has to be built differently. We have to consider what is built, and how and where it is built.

I will make some concrete suggestions about areas where our party would be happy to work alongside the Government in future to reduce those embodied carbon emissions. We have to accept a clear phase-out target for high-carbon cement, not unlike what we have done with gas boilers as part of near-zero energy buildings. We should set a date, on foot of the sectoral emissions targets that were announced, for phasing out high-carbon cement, both for concrete and bricks. The technology is available in Ireland to produce lower-carbon cement and concrete products. It costs exactly the same as older technology and there is no reason we cannot have an ambitious phase-out for those projects.

We have to shift away from high-carbon products such as steel, cement and concrete to the new technologies that are being used much more comprehensively in Scandinavia, Britain, France and continental Europe. A number of good small companies in Ireland produce high-quality timber products, not for timber-framed homes, but for a completely new form of technology for building houses, schools and other public buildings. In many cases, it is zero-carbon and, in some cases, the emissions content is negative carbon. More importantly, it is cheaper, faster and higher quality. We need Government to be far more ambitious in the use of these technologies. If it is, it will have our active support. That also means we need to address issues with planning. We need to see the new rural planning guidelines published to make sure they complement all of these strategies. We need to have far more mid-rise, high-density development in our cities and town centres. We want to work with the Minister on these areas. We urge him to be ambitious. If he is, he will have active support from our party on this side of the House.

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