From the Construct Ireland archives

As Building Regulations tighten on carbon emissions, energy reduction and mandatory renewable energy targets, the task for designers becomes harder and harder. Bobby Gilbert of Bobby Gilbert and Associates explains how a new design tool is making sustainable design easier.

Marie Stamp, Senior Trade Commissioner at the Canadian Embassy, Dublin, discusses the merits of Super E home build.

As it nears completion, John Hearne visits what is anticipated to be one of the lowest energy buildings in Ireland's recent history.

A sustainable energy project in north Tipperary has the potential to create a pioneering green community – buildings are getting energy makeovers, grants are available for renewables and the ecovillage at Cloughjordan is under construction. But getting householders in the area to go green is still proving a hard sell, as Lenny Antonelli reports

In recent years it’s become increasingly accepted that the age of cheap and abundant oil and gas supplies is coming to an end, and that future energy needs will have to be met from cleaner, more widely available fuel sources. According to Richard Douthwaite, the prospects of exponentially rising costs and failure to ramp up carbon capture and storage will mitigate against coal’s ability to take up the slack

Feasta Economist Richard Douthwaite on Greenhouse Emissions and the Oil Peak

Little did we know when campaigning for the Fingal energy standard in 2005-06 that Construct Ireland would have a direct impact on Ikea’s first Irish store. Driven by a combination of Fingal’s requirements and their own renewable energy policy, the Swedish retail giant has invested in the largest ground source heat pump installation in Ireland and the UK, along with a well-thought biomass system fed by an onsite waste stream and a host of other green measures, as John Hearne reports

Public private partnership schemes have come to dominate many aspects of Irish infrastructural development, from toll roads to urban regeneration schemes. Jason Walsh asks if they amount to privatisation by stealth and whether they come at too high a social and environmental cost.

If one was to draw a conclusion on how seriously sustainability is being taken at government level using the number of occurrences of the word "sustainable" in policy documents, housing guidelines and speeches from Ministers, it would come across that Ireland's on a sound sustainable footing.

No matter how energy efficient a building method is, constructing a house from scratch will always cause some damage to the environment - but what if a building material could absorb more carbon than it causes to be released over its life cycle? Lenny Antonelli visits a hempcrete house in Co. Down that seeks to trial this innovative method of building