Passive aggression needed to raise Ireland’s building standards

We had the technology but still built poor-quality buildings during the boom, said Mel O'Reilly of MDY Construction at a Passive House conference at DIT Bolton Street last week. Citing the likes of Priory Hall, he said it gave the building industry in Ireland a shoddy reputation.

One clear message from the day was that good buildings are comfortable: if you put in enough insulation and cut out drafts (ventilating the building mechanically), you don't need any heating systems at all. In fact, Ireland is quite temperate, and one architect, John Morehead, even posited that Cork was the best spot, in terms of climate and geographically, for passive houses.

Governments and local authorities elsewhere have been forging ahead on build-quality, said keynote speaker Prof Wolfgang Feist of the International Passive House Association, with Frankfurt having all local authority buildings built to this standard.

As there are signs of construction taking off again, we need to avoid repeating the same mistakes, O’Reilly told the See the Light conference. Quip of the day was the need to push passive buildings or, to coin it differently, to get passive aggressive.