"Green" policies are destroying this country

You do know most houses built now are timber frame.

Incorrect. What's with the misinformation, when stuff like that can be easily checked?

According to the data from the CSO - In 2019, 27% of houses built using timber frames.

Afaik Timber frames houses have an estimated lifespan of between 50-60 years. The big problem is rot. And with the climate in Ireland that is a known issue

Timber used in construction must meet specific requirements in order to achieve this level of life expectancy, with the additional requirement that the timber should be kept below 22% moisture content for the life of the building

Any water ingress through rupture of the waterproof membranes or through flooding or roof damage will considerably reduce the lifespan of a timber frame house.

According to one government report - In the case of timber frame construction, there is currently a low level of awareness and knowledge in the construction industry in relation construction methods and the potential consequences of defects where timber frame housing is not built in accordance with appropriate codes.

Tbh I'm not impressed. A lot do look more like sheds imho.

Good point.

If you buy a gold bar as an investment, putting a turd on top of it is not going to increase the value. The cost of cleaning off the turd would decrease the value.

Of course some people are fools, that is beyond doubt.

However, building massive extensions requires planning permission. No guarantee getting that. A big house on expensive land will always be worth a pile of money apart for those short periods of time at the bottom of a bust. Many do run into problems with maintenance costs in the long term.

I believe you previously posted that was pretty much your own experience where you moved from a smaller to a much larger house which is heated via an oil boiler plus coal?

I believe you also said you don't use your solar for heat - may I ask are you planning on installing a heat pump and making the house air tight or?

Well to with what you posted above

I seen someone the other day who has built a 5,000 sq ft house. Hooked it up to a oil boiler, 3 years later and they are posting on a Solar PV group asking about solar and a heat pump to reduce heating costs. House is not air tight or anything. To heat with oil is costing a fortune.

The advice given by majority was to shave off 2,000 sq ft if they want to reduce heating bills :-) Stick that house up to sell now and nobody will touch it because its will cost a fortune to heat as the owner is finding out, plus to upgrade to proper standard will mean 3 phase for the A2W plus trying to retro fit air tightness.

And I asked "may I ask are you planning on installing a heat pump and making the house air tight or?" as per advice given

Fairly straightforward question I think.

You wont answer questions, and now you wont even discuss what you post.

With that attitude why bother posting ?

This is a discussion forum with a reply function. Not a propaganda leaflet drop.

It seems as if that poster believes that anything they post should for some unexplained reason be taken as gospel without question. Rather bizarre imho on a discussion forum.

One of the big concerns I have is that we're signed up to both EU agreements and international treaties on reduction of emissions and we have done very little to get anywhere near achieving those. We won't tackle agricultural emissions as it's too politically sensitive and there isn't a democratic will do so. Effectively that means we're going to be buying a lot of carbon credits and paying big fines which means that we will quite likely be producing beef and milk at a loss when you look at the overall economic impact of it.

The state's going to be buying those credits / paying those fines, or they'll be utterly crucifying other sectors, households, the energy sector, transport etc with levies to fund them. People keep going on about industry - we don't really have very many examples of high pollution / high CO2 energy intensive industries other than Irish Cement and Aughinish alumina, every other big emitter is an electrical generation station.

Also I don't understand how deep retrofits of homes can achieve scale. They're too expensive and even if we had unlimited money to do them, there won't be sufficient construction workers to do them in anything like a reasonable time scale. You could be looking at 30+ years. It's a worthwhile cause, but it's not going to achieve a sudden reduction in CO2 emissions. It's more of a longterm and slow project, and our housing is particularly challenging as the vast majority of it is low density and individual buildings.

It's a democratic choice though and we are seemingly willing to pay those fines and not deal with the issues.

We also haven't moved rapidly on public transport and we are still dragging our feet on sustainable development. So, I don't know exactly what the plan is... pay huge fines and just suck it up somehow while being an international disgrace? Seems to be where we're headed.

There's one large and several smaller elephants in the room and we are not prepared to acknowledge they exist.

I'm genuinely not impressed with some of the high profile Greens here, as they're spending all their time chasing gimmicky topics or whatever's the buzz word online e.g. chasing aircraft emissions or going on and on about cars, when we've no public transit options and scattered housing. EVs are going to have to be a big part of the mix here, there's not much point in being anti-car unless you plan to demolish most of the houses in the country, which is simply not possible or desirable. WE're going to have to make a lot of scattered housing sustainable somehow and that means EVs.

Ryan isn't an honest broker as minister for the environment, either reshuffle him to health or social welfare or remove him from any ministry,