On Friday evening a story came into my facebook feed from an organisation called TFMR Ireland. What followed next was the most bizarre 36 hours and leaves no doubt in my mind how social media is undermining the ‘debate’ on the referendum.

TFMR run a facebook page and when I went to find out what they were about it said the following on their twitter handle:

“Parents affected by Fatal & Severe Foetal Anomalies. Supporting, Educating, Destigmatising & Advocating for legal change. Contact team@tfmrireland.com”

So I thought to myself, ok. I’m a parent that has buried a child that had anencephaly. I’ve had first-hand experience of what these people are talking about so I wanted to see how they were representing children like my son Noah.

This time last year was a very peculiar time to say the least.  I was still trying to find my feet after a business failure 8 months earlier.  I was the proud father of a… 

It had been an extraordinary week.  We brought two new baby boys into our family on the Monday morning, Ethan and Noah.  Their mother, Caitriona, had to endure a caesarean section and the physical trauma that goes with that.  Now here we were on a damp autumnal Saturday morning having a private duel outside of a graveyard with a small white box  rather than with pistols or swords. I emerged victorious.  Caitriona had fought to keep Noah, to hold him for a precious few more minutes. I could not see the point in prolonging the suffering.  Noah was gone.  All we held were his mortal remains.  He drew his last breadth in our arms, desperately and defiantly, on Thursday evening.  In was time to commit his remains to the earth in amongst his antecedents who lay before him.  And so we walked across the concrete and the grass, stumbling between the graves, Noah’s white coffin wrapped under my right arm with Caitriona’s arm intertwined with my left.

I have a 4 year old son called Elliot.  He’s in pre-school at the moment.  Every morning I drive him there we have 10 minutes to ourselves where I try to resolve or answer his questions.… 

The challenge with ultra low energy construction and building to the Passive House standard is managing the thermal pressure points that we call thermal bridges.  I liken it to pumping the wheel of a push bike.  The higher the tyre pressure (insulation level) the faster the air will escape if there is a fault in the tube or tyre (thermal bridge).  Most people underestimate the effect of thermal bridging.  In fact, it can wreak havoc with your investment in insulation.

Double leaf masonry construction is still extremely popular in both the UK and Ireland.  However, up until around 2012 the masonry cavity was stuck at 150mm maximum width (and a resultant u-value of 0.2 W/m2K with the insulation technology of that era).  Then Ancon introduced their teplo wall tie range that brought 300mm wide cavities into play for double leaf masonry.  Subsequent to this, Varty Engineering introduced their range of S/W wall ties which provided an alternative solution for superwide cavity construction.  Both of these solutions made it possible to achieve wall u-values as low as 0.1 W/m2K in double leaf masonry construction with relatively cheap insulation (thermal conductivity = 0.044 W/mK).

Any builder or contractor can build a double leaf masonry cavity up to 300mm wide – that’s the easy bit.  The challenge is to do this while also achieving the necessary thermal bridge and airtightness detailing.  I have spent over 10 years experimenting with solutions to this challenge.  Every time I thought I got it figured out someone would come along with another angle which resulted in the whole lot being thrown back up in the air again.  Well, wouldn’t you know, the solution that I ended up with was very very similar to what we started with way back in 2006.  In the following post I will give an overview of how this is achieved in practice.

A lot of people may choose to remember this past summer as being bookended by the BREXIT vote and the Olympics.  Here in Ireland we had some reasonable weather, three olympic medal winning heros to welcome home (two from Cork……ahem !) and more recently a pretty awkward coporation tax issue to contend with.

While all this was going on I was fortunate enough to witness some fantastic individuals and organisations work during this time to promote a building standard that will have a transformative effect of societies everywhere.  This building standard is called Passive House.  It is 25 years old and hails form Germany (but was developed by an Austrian physicist and a Swedish professor). It is a rigorous energy and comfort standard.  It is evidence based and provides quality assurance as part of the mix.  This building standard offers the quite unbelieveable win-win of assuring a more comfortable & healthy built environment while at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 emissions.

From my point of view this past summer was bookended by two events which I believe made an important contribution to the debate regarding building standards in Ireland.  The first was jointly hosted on 2nd June by English sustainable architect practice – Architype – and Cork based timber frame manufacturer – Cygnum. It was held at The Lighthouse cinema in Smithfield and the theme for the night was ‘Passivhaus Uncovered’.  The second event, entitled ‘Delivering Cost Effective Passive House in Ireland’, was hosted by the Passive House Academy on 25 August  at the LexIcon in Dun Laoghaire.

Both events had to contend with (un)seasonal high summer sunshine and the annual desertification of Dublin for the summer holidays.  Notwithstanding this, both events drew great crowds and served up some compelling presentations.