Kathriona Devereux: ‘The choices we make now will make ripples for decades’
Kathriona Devereux says she has spent the past few months meeting people around the country working to find solutions to some of Ireland’s biggest challenges for 10 Things To Know About.
From improving our resilience to extreme weather to developing new vaccines, the six-part series shines a light on the science that shapes and connects us all — from our health and homes to the planet we share.
Last night’s episode looked at the technological challenges of tackling the housing crisis and explored how we build Ireland in the coming decade will shape not just our skylines, but our shared future.
Everyone knows Ireland is in the midst of a housing and infrastructure crisis. Much-needed homes, water, and energy projects must be built as soon as possible. But it takes huge amounts of time, skill, and material to construct a single house. We often forget that the world around us, our built environment, depends entirely on resources extracted from the natural world: stone, cement, metals, wood.
For every house built in Ireland, around 400 tonnes of aggregate are needed — roughly a house-sized hole in the ground.
Stone, sand, and gravel are the unsung building blocks of Ireland’s homes, roads, schools, and hospitals. Even something as unglamorous as gypsum from Monaghan, a key ingredient in plasterboard, is critical to solving Ireland’s housing crisis. Without it, many of our building projects could not happen.
But Ireland’s housing crisis is not just a shortage of homes — it is a collision between two urgent national priorities: fixing what’s broken in our housing system and meeting our climate commitments to cut carbon emissions to try and cool the planet. The uncomfortable truth is that the way we build today, and the materials we depend on, are creating carbon emissions we can’t afford.
According to the Irish Green Building Council, if Ireland goes ahead with all the projects planned under the various housing strategies and the National Development Plan, emissions from construction could significantly exceed the national carbon budget. Even as we make homes more energy-efficient and our electricity grid grows greener, the “embodied carbon” from manufacturing, transporting, and assembling building materials is set to soar.
Concrete is the world’s second-most used material after water. It is an essential construction material that builds our homes, bridges, schools, and power stations. But it has a staggering environmental cost. Globally, the production of cement, the binding ingredient in concrete, is responsible for 7–8% of all CO2 emissions.
That’s because the process of making cement is carbon-intensive twice over. To produce cement, limestone and clay are heated in a kiln at incredibly hot temperatures. The enormous amount of fuel needed to heat the kiln releases lots of CO2, and the limestone itself emits CO2 when it breaks down.
For every tonne of cement produced, just under a tonne of CO2 is released. Multiply that by billions of tonnes each year, and you begin to see why cement is one of the biggest industrial sources of greenhouse gases on the planet.
In Ireland, cement companies are among our top carbon emitters. Some have made modest emissions reductions by switching away from coal as a source of fuel and improving efficiency. Others, like EcoCem, reduce emissions by replacing a large share of cement with GGBS (ground granulated blast-furnace slag), a by-product of steelmaking imported from Europe. This substitution can cut the carbon footprint of concrete significantly.
Carbon capture and storage, where the emissions released during the manufacturing process are captured before being released to the atmosphere is still to be done at large scale. Other processes aim to recapture CO2 and feed it back into cement production. Start-ups claim they can reduce emissions by up to 70%, through these technologies but overall, a mass produced, widely available, low carbon form of concrete is still a long way off.
Despite the slow progress to make concrete more sustainable, the overarching challenge to build more homes, faster, but with less carbon is driving a quiet revolution in Ireland’s construction sector.
Filming for the series, I met UCD’s Dr. Daniel McCrum at an indoor construction site to get a better understanding of Modern Methods of Construction (MMC).
McCrum leads the national innovation centre Construct Innovate, which focuses on making construction more productive, affordable, and sustainable.
McCrum argues that traditional, labour-intensive building methods can no longer deliver the volume or the efficiency we need. “It’s almost impossible to find a bricklayer under 50,” he says, “and the industry will need 120,000 extra people in the coming years. We simply don’t have the workforce to keep doing things the old way.”
Modern Methods of Construction cover seven main approaches, from off-site manufacturing and modular housing to 3D printing and material innovations.
At Glenveagh’s prefabrication factory in Carlow, housed in the former Braun factory, whole sections of homes are built indoors in controlled conditions - a safer, cleaner, and more predictable environment than a building site.
Timber-framed units are assembled on-site in days, not months, cutting construction time by up to 40%. The factory also offers steady, 9-to-5 work and has proven more appealing to women, a group historically underrepresented in construction.
Timber offers another advantage. A climate bonus. Timber-frame construction locks the carbon absorbed by the trees into the very fabric of the building.
Around 30% of new homes built in Ireland last year used timber-frame systems. Modernising how we build can deliver for the community and the climate.
Walking the Glenveagh factory floor, it was fascinating to see Eircodes printed on the side of enormous, plastic-wrapped bundles - new homes, neatly packaged and ready for delivery to site, like the biggest Ikea order you could imagine.
It reminded me that the choices we make now about materials and methods will send ripples through our economy, our communities, and our climate for decades to come.
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