Modular housing that’s ‘as good if not better than traditionally built homes’

Ciaran Walshe is a man on a mission, passionate about doing his bit to save the planet and solve the housing crisis. Both are lofty aspirations. Determined to pay them more than lip service Walshe sold his house, gave up a well-paid job in construction and ploughed all of his savings into setting up MMC Eco Homes with manufacturing industry veteran Paul Iredale in 2020.

The company has since built in Sweden, Lithuania and the UK and has just had its Irish launch in Walshe’s home city of Galway where the on-site build of his own Georgian-style eco-house took just three days.

“What we’ve designed, after a great deal of R&D, are A-rated homes that do not cost the earth to build in more ways than one,” Walshe says. “With our system, it’s feasible to work at scale and at speed to create sustainable, affordable, energy-efficient housing with longevity comparable to traditionally built houses.”

Walshe has been in construction in the UK since he left NUIG in 2006 with a degree in commerce and accounting. He started out in finance, but to tell the truth he had always wanted to be outdoors rather than sitting in an office crunching numbers.

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Walshe’s dad is a builder and his son grew up fascinated by how buildings grew out of nothing and took shape. When a perceptive manager with the McCabe group where Walshe was working at the time suggested he should go back to college to study construction, he didn’t think twice. He signed up for a degree course at what was then DIT Bolton Street and graduated four years later with a particular interest in modern methods of modular construction.

“When you say ‘modular housing’ people immediately think of the prefabs we had in school, which were freezing and leaked. That’s not what our houses are like at all. They’re as good if not better than traditionally built homes,” Walshe says.

With a degree under his belt Walshe returned to the UK where he spent the next part of his career working with some of the biggest names in UK construction, including Ardmore and Wilmott Dixon, companies with massive budgets and sites running to 1,000 houses and more. “These are some of the best and toughest contractors out there, so it was a fantastic learning curve for me,” Walshe says.

In 2016, he was all set to strike out on his own as part of a new partnership when the Brexit vote happened and the backing money dried up overnight. “Nobody expected Brexit in London, it took everyone completely by surprise and it was something of a wake-up call for me as it got me thinking about what direction I wanted to go in,” Walshe says.

“I was very much leaning towards the idea of eco-homes as I firmly believed this was the way of the future. I was prepared to launch myself solo into this area and had actually been to Italy looking for suppliers when I met Paul. We hit it off immediately as we were like-minded about how the housing crisis needs to be tackled.

“Our houses are built using a structurally insulated panel system, which we developed using the latest technologies,” Walshe says. “They come in pre-assembled sections from our factory with all of the electrical conduits, backboxes, plaster boarding, internal walls, floors, roofing, bathroom pods, windows and doors already installed. This dramatically reduces construction time and increases the quality of the finished home as it is assembled in a controlled environment.”

To date, the company’s customers have all been self-builds, but the sweet spot for MMC will be construction firms who will buy and use the kits on their own sites.

Getting the kits from the drawing board and into production was a hard slog, which started back in 2018 when Walshe and Iredale began working on the mountain of paperwork work required to meet stringent international certification requirements for their building system.

“These were tough times,” Walshe says. “Paul was living in Lithuania. I was commuting there from Ireland every week and it would have been impossible without the support of my partner, Ellen. Because we had a limited budget, about €500,000 which is tiny by comparison with what the big players would have spent on a project like this, we were doing everything ourselves and calling in favours from friends and family. At times it was very disheartening with nothing tangible to show for all the work and a dwindling bank balance.

“We had to prepare over 6,500 individual documents to cover fire testing and all the other necessary certifications for every element of our product. It took grit to keep plugging away until it was all in place including our BOPAS (buildoffsite property assurance scheme) certification as this provides a 60-year guarantee backed by Lloyds Register,” Walshe says.

MMC employs 25 people between Ireland, the UK and Lithuania (where the units are built) and it now has investors on board who share the Walshe-Iredale vision for scalable, affordable housing. “For them, it’s a passion project and that’s very much how we see it. Money has never been a motivator. It hasn’t been an easy ride, but I don’t regret leaving a well-rewarded corporate career to do something I really believed in for a second,” says Walshe who is about to experience another big life event with the arrival of twins before Christmas.