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10 Things to Know About - Season 11 Episode 2 -
Building Ireland
Building Ireland
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00:00Why are we so resistant to change and what can we do to challenge the status
00:04quo? And how do invasive species threaten nature and their way of life? We'll be
00:11looking into all this and more on 10 things to know about.
00:22This week we're exploring how Ireland is built from the minerals and materials
00:26that create our towns and cities to the drive to reshape the future of construction.
00:44Ireland is in the midst of a housing and infrastructure crisis with many homes and
00:50critical water and energy projects needing to be built. And if you need to
00:55build something, you need something to build with. But how many of us actually
01:00think about where all these building materials come from? The answer is all
01:05around us, both above and below ground.
01:11Ireland has a natural wealth of core building materials and we've been
01:16quarrying them here for centuries. I'm in County Monaghan to meet Owen McGrath from
01:21Geological Survey Ireland.
01:26What are raw materials and where do they come from?
01:27Well, raw materials, Fergus, we still just dig them out of the ground and we use those to build our homes and our
01:31schools and our hospitals. So we dig rock out of the ground, we crush it up to make
01:35aggregate and mix that with cement, which also comes out of the ground.
01:38How much raw materials are needed, say, to build a house?
01:40It's a lot more than you'd think. For an average three bedroom semi-detached house in a new housing
01:45estate, it's in the order of 300 tonnes of material.
01:48That is a huge amount.
01:49It's quite a lot. So if you think about it, for every house, you need to have a house sized hole in the ground to build that house with.
01:55When you look around your home, you'll see a lot more things that have come out of the ground.
02:00Everything in your home that is metal has been mined. Anything that's coated with zinc, anything that's made of copper, the wires in your electrical equipment, the pipes that carry the water to and from your home, all of that stuff has to be mined and has to be produced, refined and then turned into a product before it's brought and used to construct your home.
02:21Natural resources form the backbone of Ireland's construction industry, and I'm heading underground with geologist Siobhan Power to find out a bit more about one of our key resources, gypsum, which was first discovered in this area in the 1800s.
02:51So gypsum, it's a mineral. It's calcium sulfate. It forms by evaporation. And you can see it's a very soft material. See, it's actually softer than your nail.
03:01You can really scrape it.
03:03You can really scrape it. People possibly know about gypsum being as an additive to cement for the making of mortar or concrete. And also maybe they know it from your chalk from school times, from the blackboard.
03:15The primary use is the making of plasterboard. They extract it, they crush it, they dry it, and then they wet it again to mould it into these flat sheets between two sheets of paper.
03:27And it's a very useful construction material for the interior of houses, ceilings.
03:34Minerals like gypsum help tell our planet's amazing geological story.
03:39The Earth's outer rigid layer consists of giant jigsaw pieces known as tectonic plates that are constantly moving.
03:46And while it's hard to imagine today, the pieces that created the island of Ireland moved from south of the equator to our current location over hundreds of millions of years.
03:58The slow movement of these plates helped forge the mineral deposits that would become the foundation of our natural resources. Minerals like zinc, copper and gypsum.
04:08So it all formed over 250 million years ago. It's very hot, very little rain. These water bodies would evaporate that concentrated the minerals that were in the water.
04:20And so we're left with this big, think of it as a big desert or a big sea of gypsum.
04:25So apart from the usefulness of the gypsum, it is a lovely snapshot of the Irish geological history and a very important little section of the Irish geological story, if you like.
04:39What's the role of a geologist in sourcing building materials?
04:43Well, geologists like rocks. Geologists like to map rocks because we first went looking after coal. This is 180 years ago.
04:51But then we mapped the whole of the geology of Ireland. In a place like here, they were able to identify two beds of gypsum.
05:00And from the readings, they would have known the dipping direction and would have known where to go underground to search for.
05:08And that's what geologists do now is to map out the whole understanding of the underground.
05:13So if we take drill core, that gives us individual spots that we can develop a model of what it looks like underneath.
05:21So it's almost like we're building up a 3D picture of the underground and telling the story of that.
05:26That's exactly what we are doing, yes.
05:28What a fascinating science to be involved in.
05:30It's the best science to be involved with, yes. It is kind of a detective thing. It's observational and infinitely useful.
05:37Mining remains essential to supply the raw materials on which our modern world is built.
05:54But we need to maximize resources and minimize environmental impacts.
05:58Locating manufacturing plants beside quarries cuts transportation costs, promotes recycling and reduces waste.
06:06This operation is 90 years old next year.
06:09We've got three to four families with four generations of that family working for us, both here at the factory and at the mine site.
06:17You obviously have a huge history and tradition here of mining.
06:21So can you tell me about some of the modern recycling methods that you're using?
06:25We use a high percentage of external construction-based plasterboard recycling material.
06:30So the material that comes in from an external source is offloaded in a plasterboard recycling facility.
06:36We mix that with some of our own internal material and we blend that in with our own gypsum and water and different additives to make plasterboard.
06:43The more recycled material we use in plasterboard manufacturing, the less virgin rock material we use from local mining.
06:50Today we've seen a really nice example of where we have a mine and a processing plant really close together.
06:57How important is it to have this industry here in Ireland?
07:00It's really important for economic reasons, but it's also really important for climate and sustainability reasons.
07:05Everything that we produce and that we use in Ireland that comes out of the mines in this area of the country,
07:10if we didn't produce them here, they would have to be imported with the consequent carbon impact.
07:14It's like shop local.
07:15It's exactly shop local.
07:17Right now we're in the midst of two predicaments.
07:32We need to build more houses and infrastructure and we need to cut our carbon emissions.
07:36But if we build more, we emit more.
07:38So to meet the challenges of the housing and climate crisis, we need to modernise.
07:43And modernising the construction industry also has to factor in an ageing workforce and skills shortage.
07:49Daniel McCrum is a structural engineer at UCD.
07:53We think about standard ways of doing construction.
07:56You know, you think of a masonry house where you have a bricklayer who's manually doing these processes.
08:01And they're very hard to find those bricklayers anymore.
08:04As well as that, we have an ageing society.
08:06We're going to have less workers in the future.
08:08So on one side we have to rethink the way we're doing construction.
08:11But then on the other side is the climate emergency that we have.
08:15By 2030, we'll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 50%.
08:20If we think about concrete, which is the second most used material in the world after water,
08:25it's an excellent building material.
08:27But if you think about the materials that are required in concrete,
08:31we have aggregates, which are small stones.
08:33We have sand.
08:34They both have to come from quarries.
08:36Then we have water and then we have cement.
08:38That cement is produced using very high temperature processes using fossil fuels.
08:44So it has something we refer to as very high embodied carbon because the emissions are so large.
08:49So the question is, how do we change the traditional materials that we need to use?
08:54But also how do we bring in new materials and then new processes?
08:57What are those new methods?
08:59We're in a factory here today.
09:00We can see one of those types of construction.
09:02So that's offsite construction.
09:04We can build the entire modules of our building, you know, three dimensional modules.
09:08So we build the floor and the wall panels.
09:10We can bring them to the building site, stack them together to create our buildings.
09:13So this is kind of an indoor building site.
09:15It looks like a factory to us, but actually all the components of the houses are being made here to be transported to the site eventually.
09:21That's exactly it.
09:23Robotic technology is transforming construction.
09:27And Daniel's colleagues in UCD are developing new concrete mixes to be used by robots.
09:33And then the other side is, we'll be changing the structural thicknesses.
09:37So reducing the thickness of the walls because they're too strong at present.
09:40So we're reducing those down, doing the testing to verify that this works.
09:45Timber is an important material in modern methods of construction.
09:58As trees grow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their wood.
10:03When timber is used in construction, this stored carbon remains locked within the building.
10:11You see timber frame construction here today.
10:13And last year that counted for 31% of all new build residential homes were built using timber frame.
10:19This is a massive transformation.
10:20You're saying for over 31% of new houses are being built with this method.
10:24We won't be able to say building something brick by brick anymore.
10:27Well, absolutely, because we'll be building them by panel by panel or module by module.
10:32Timber frame construction and the use of pre-manufactured components are just some of the ways the industry is improving efficiency and reducing emissions.
10:40Jason Van Hout is showing me new technologies being developed to enhance the potential of timber based construction.
10:47What we're looking at now is a new prototype that we're looking to bring forward.
10:51It's a lightweight, innovative cladding system.
10:54It's basically a fibre cement board with computer generated 3D printed brick.
10:59I mean, it feels and looks exactly like a traditional house.
11:02It's as strong as one as well.
11:04Yeah, this has been through a lot of climate testing, durability testing, fire and acoustics.
11:09And when I've seen some of these houses in our apartment blocks in construction,
11:12it's kind of amazing to see a crane just lifting in, you know, a whole floor, the side of the building.
11:18It just makes everything so much faster.
11:20Very much so.
11:21It is well documented.
11:22There's the diminishing labour workforce.
11:24So we've got to look at smarter and more efficient ways to deliver our houses.
11:28Now, that doesn't mean that the traditional construction workers will now be redundant.
11:33It's about evolving and re-skilling that workforce.
11:37With rising construction costs, price remains a key consideration.
11:41While this type of method may have higher upfront costs than a traditional build,
11:46by assembling key elements in a controlled environment, some weather and site issues can be avoided,
11:51allowing for faster, more efficient delivery.
11:54But you're a big company.
11:55What about this kind of small builders?
11:57Will this kind of technology be available to them as well?
12:00That's a key point.
12:01The more that people deliver and start bringing this sort of type of innovation to the market,
12:06it's going to become more prominent.
12:09And then once it becomes more prominent and used more often,
12:12then that's when you see prices coming down.
12:16Will we be able to reconcile all the construction and infrastructure that needs to be built with our carbon emission budget?
12:23I think we stand a good chance.
12:26Whether we'll achieve it all by 2030 or not, that remains to be seen.
12:30What I see with modern methods of construction, I think, over the next few years,
12:34is they won't be comparing themselves to traditional construction anymore.
12:38They're going to start competing amongst themselves for lower embodied carbon.
12:42So I think that's where the competition is going to be.
12:45This is the most amount of change I've seen in the industry in the last few years.
12:49And I think it's very exciting.
12:51And I think not all of it, but mostly the industry is very energized by it.
12:56The truth is traditional methods of construction and a business as usual approach to building
13:01are not going to cut it when it comes to meeting our housing and climate targets.
13:05The good news is there are innovative solutions out there.
13:08And if the industry can embrace this progress, the results could be transformative.
13:21It has been said that one of the greenest buildings is the one that already exists.
13:34Geologist Patrick Weiss-Jackson studies Ireland's architecture to inform building conservation and restoration that's both accurate and visually seamless.
13:53He's taking me on a tour of Dublin city centre.
13:58So Patrick, what kind of stone are we looking at here?
14:04Well, this is a lovely yellow stone.
14:06And to be able to tell what it is, what a geologist would do, is they would want to get nice and close to it.
14:12First of all, I can feel it, and you can feel it's a little bit rough.
14:16Yeah, you can feel the texture.
14:17You've got a bit of texture to it.
14:18And then using the hand lens, if you get up nice and close, I can see sand grains in there.
14:23This is a sandstone from a place called Darleydale in Derbyshire.
14:27In Victorian times, they were very flamboyant, and the stone reflects that, the colour of the stone.
14:32If we move through college green, we'll go from yellows to reds to greys and to blacks.
14:38There are about 170 different stone types used in the city.
14:42All coming from different places?
14:43All coming from different places.
14:45Well, as we move up the street, we will see the stone types actually change a little bit.
14:50And this is one of my favourite buildings.
14:52It was the National Bank, and it's built of ballynock and granite, so West Wicklow.
14:59And what is unusual about this stone, in this case, it's been highly carved.
15:04You don't normally get it as highly carved as that.
15:07It's very beautiful.
15:08It is very beautiful.
15:09And it shows also that the banks had the money to spend on stone.
15:14Here we have another bank building, and the stone is different.
15:18If we get close to it, you will see that it's a limestone.
15:21And then, for me, the really interesting thing, that many people wouldn't bother looking at, is this.
15:25This is the prince for the railings.
15:28Yes.
15:29And it looks a bit like black pudding.
15:30Yes, it does.
15:31With big crystals of quartz in here.
15:34And this is a rock from Besbrook in County Down.
15:38I suspect it was used as a sort of symbol for the fact this was the Ulsterbank.
15:43So could they get an Ulsterstone in here?
15:46On my tour with Patrick, I'm struck that while statues honor figures from literature, music and history,
15:52their stone opens up a window into a far older story of ancient fossilized creatures frozen in time.
15:59It just shows the type of environment these limestones were growing in.
16:03So this would have been quite warm tropical water where corals were thriving.
16:07Okay.
16:08Yeah, I love this.
16:09I think it's beautiful.
16:10Local rock gives our town their distinctive character and signature.
16:26But that stone can become weathered and damaged over time.
16:30So how do you go about restoring the facade or the structural integrity of these kind of historical and heritage buildings?
16:37You would have a survey done of the building.
16:39You'd look at the facade and you'd assess every block of stone within it.
16:45You'd work out the three-dimensional shape.
16:47You'd look at whether it was decayed on the surface.
16:50The first step of any building restoration is working out where the original stone came from.
16:55And Patrick is taking me to Trinity's public theater.
16:58It was built in the late 18th century, but its story goes back much further in geological time.
17:04So this is an example here of a West Wicklow Leinster granite.
17:10This was originally formed during the Devonian period when there was a collision between two continents and an ocean disappeared.
17:17Wow.
17:18And so you got the land masses colliding.
17:21Materials pushed down and melted and lots of granite came up.
17:25Okay.
17:26And the Leinster granite, which runs from Kalini all the way down to Waterford, is just one huge batholith, one huge mass of granite.
17:35It's not all the same.
17:37And so we have to look at this stone and try to characterize it.
17:41By studying tiny details in the stone, Patrick seeks to trace its origin.
17:46I'm about to get an even closer view of our geological past with the use of a special microscope.
17:52Amy, here we have our petrological microscope with our thin section of granite in place.
17:58And when you look down the eyepieces, you will see three different minerals within that.
18:03They come up in different colors.
18:05Definitely.
18:06The gray is the quartz, the stripy is the feldspar, and then the lovely bluey-green orangey mineral, that's the mica.
18:13So it allows us to really look at this stone in more detail.
18:18That's fantastic.
18:29The next step is some good old-fashioned detective work.
18:32By studying handwritten records and documents in the college archives, and comparing those to old maps from the 18th century, Patrick is able to narrow down the search to three stone quarries in Wicklow.
18:45So one of these stone quarries is where the stone comes from, but you have to work out exactly which one.
18:51Yes.
18:52And so we go to another piece of research, and here we have a paper by a man called Peter Brook.
18:59He mapped the northern part of the Leinster granite.
19:04What we're interested in here is type two, the equi-granular, which is this.
19:10So we see Ballynocken here.
19:12If we've decided, yes, we definitely know that the stone here in Trinity came from Blessington and Golden Hill, then if we go down to Ballynocken and to Granabeg further south, we're in the right unit.
19:23It's just fascinating work. And then, of course, you know, we want to learn about the people involved, the stonemasons, stone carvers, the architects, and so on, that have gone towards building this.
19:36So it's a jigsaw puzzle.
19:37Granite from Ballynocken in County Wicklow was used in hundreds of historic Dublin buildings, and it's now being used to help restore them.
19:48The McEvoys have been quarrying granite since the 1840s, and John McEvoy is a fifth generation stonemason.
19:55Hi. Nice to meet you.
19:57Hi. Nice to meet you.
19:58So, John, how do you go about figuring out what piece of stone to use or what to use to restore a thing with?
20:04Well, the first thing we do is we try to organise a site visit so we can see the stone in place and see what way it is.
20:12And then you have your grain to consider, and then you have your colour, because with quarrying practices, the deeper you go down, the whiter, brighter, harder, more dense the stone becomes.
20:24Okay.
20:25But we're talking about matching stone at a time where the quarries were mainly surface quarries because water pumps weren't readily available.
20:33Electricity wasn't here at all.
20:35Then we look at what finishes on that stone.
20:37So many different finishes can be put on it, from a punched finish to a draught finish, and they call this rough ashlar finish, where it's all left like a natural rock finish.
20:48And then we will match that.
20:50Now, there's no machines to match all those old finishes today, so a lot of them are still done here by hand.
20:56So it's a very hard, tough game.
20:58Yeah.
20:59But it's a very rewarding game.
21:00Yeah.
21:01Because, you know, when you create something and you make something from scratch, and you know you've been shown something by your uncle or your father or your grandfather that they used to do, and you know that you were putting a little bit of what they thought into that piece.
21:17It's a magical feeling.
21:20We're the custodians of our buildings, and there's over 600 buildings in Dublin that have used Ballynock and Granite.
21:26That's a massive amount of buildings.
21:28The skeleton of Dublin city is Ballynock and Granite.
21:31That's the way we look on it.
21:33So if we don't maintain this and maintain it to the highest standard by using the stone where the building's DNA is, well, what you have then is you might be mixing it with imported stones, which don't fit our climate.
21:47They don't look like our stone, and you'll end up with this patchwork quilt effect, which isn't very nice to look at.
21:54By using the original stone, we're also then preserving the culture and the craftsmanship that went into making that stone.
22:01That is really important. By utilizing this material, there are opportunities to train people in these crafts, so they're not lost.
22:11There is another good reason. We have to consider the carbon cost.
22:16So if we bring in granite from the continent or indeed from China, what's the carbon cost of getting it here as against bringing it from West Wicklow?
22:26We need to protect our buildings, whether that's honoring centuries of history or using technology to look to the future.
22:33It takes time and passion and expertise to sustain and preserve our built environment.
22:46That's our 10 things to know about building Ireland. Next time, we're exploring the science of our increasingly severe storms.
22:58Let's see.
23:02Let's see.
23:06All right.
23:12We have to see.
23:17Stay tuned.
23:22Let's see.
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