Retrofitters warm to the task

WITH HOUSEBUILDING having almost ground to a halt here, the building industry has turned its attentions to retrofitting homes to improve insulation and make them more eco-friendly.

Among them is Saint-Gobain, the French building materials giant.

Its Gyproc subsidiary is the biggest supplier of plaster and plasterboard to the construction industry here, using gypsum from a mine in Cavan.

It also has an insulation division here called Isover.

Gyproc boomed in the Celtic Tiger years but chief executive Brian Dolan told me this week that revenues have declined by 70 per cent in the recession while staff numbers at its Kingscourt base have roughly halved to 160.

Dolan estimates that about 8,000 new units will be built in the Republic this year – compared with more than 90,000 in 2007.

“That’s some fall but, on the other side, most of the new builds now are of a very high spec with people going for good BER [energy] ratings, which is good for us,” Dolan said.

Dolan, who recently returned to Ireland to run the business for Saint-Gobain, has drafted a five-year plan for the business.

He sees housebuilding picking up again from the end of next year, driven by demand in Dublin, Cork and Limerick.

“The sustainable level of [new] housing is about 35,000 [units a year],” Dolan said. But that won’t be until “sometime after 2016”.

In the meantime, Gyproc’s focus is on retrofitting. Dolan estimates that 70 per cent of our housing stock needs retrofitting. That’s 1.26 million homes. The average cost is probably about €12,000 a pop, creating a potential industry of €15 billion.

He believes this could be funded by the National Pension Reserve Fund – what’s left of it – with householders making monthly repayments to meet the costs.

“In a nutshell, this would be a long-term, risk-free and stable money maker for the pension funds,” he argues, citing similar incentives in the UK as part of a “Green Deal” initiative led by the Liberal Democrats.

Dolan clearly has a vested interest and his figures could be overly-optimistic but, in the current climate, both economic and meteorological, his idea might be worth considering.