The Irish government has adopted a seven-point action plan that will make wood the main material in public construction. Responsible ministries and deadlines have been set for each point of the plan.
Under this plan, submitted to the government this week, local timber will become the “first material”, whose use will be considered in every publicly funded building. The responsible ministries have now been tasked with examining recommendations on regulation, procurement, carbon policy and professional skills, reports the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, which on Tuesday published the final report of the interdepartmental Timber in Construction Steering Group.
The steering group was set up in November 2023 and included representatives from 64 institutions and organisations. Over its two years of work its representatives met 15 times, after which the Minister for Agriculture, Martin Heydon, presented the group’s conclusions to the government. In the report seven strategic recommendations are grouped into three parts: “Regulation and standards”, “Procurement and carbon policy” and “Innovation, training and uptake”. Each has a designated lead and an implementation timetable, beginning in June 2026.
The procurement plan is based on the public Wood-First strategy, led by the Office of Public Works. It will require public sector bodies to consider using wood and timber structural systems as the primary material in new buildings, building extensions and large-scale renovation projects, except where there are well-founded technical or economic counter-arguments. South Dublin County Council has already adopted its own “Wood First” policy, and the report cites France and Scotland as examples where similar mechanisms have helped wood take a firm place in construction.
The Minister of State for Forestry, Niall Collins, said the recommendations are the product of two years of cooperation between the government, academics and more than 60 sector representatives. The ministry he leads is coordinating the work with the lead agencies tasked with overseeing implementation.
“The recommendations form a roadmap towards secure regulation and wider use of wood,” said N. Collins.
In the field of regulation, the National Standards Authority of Ireland has been tasked with drawing up the country’s first national technical specification for mass-engineered timber. It will cover fire safety, durability, moisture resistance, acoustics and structural stability for a range of products, including cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glulam. While this specification is being drawn up, a centralised group of specialist advisers, with government funding of around 190,000 euros, will support building control authorities and fire service officers assessing mass timber projects against building regulations.
The carbon emissions recommendations foresee Ireland moving ahead of EU requirements. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland must publish an action plan on life-cycle global warming potential (GWP) limits by January 2027, while mandatory carbon intensity targets for all new buildings will apply from 2030. Since September 2025 all Irish public sector bodies have been obliged to carry out full life-cycle carbon assessments for directly procured construction projects, and the report calls for these requirements to be tightened further from June 2026.
The Minister for Enterprise, Peter Burke, stressed that the steering group’s work opens up policy options that will prompt radical change in the use of wood, help provide housing with modern methods of construction and reduce the environmental impact of building: “It is a credible policy roadmap for increasing the added value in our timber industry.”
The remaining recommendations include creating a new industry-led Timber Knowledge Development and Innovation structure, to be formed by Enterprise Ireland together with the Departments of Enterprise and Agriculture. It is recommended that timber construction be integrated as a core component in architecture and engineering study programmes and that targeted incentives be introduced, among them possible grants, tax reliefs or viability-gap supports for mass timber projects. An academic survey carried out for the group shows that fewer than 50% of academic staff in Irish higher education institutions have worked with industry organisations on mass timber questions, and that engineering courses remain strongly oriented towards concrete and steel.
The stakes are high not only in the construction sector: Ireland’s target is to build more than 300,000 new homes by 2030, while roundwood harvest volumes are forecast to rise from 5 million to almost 7.8 million cubic metres by 2035.
Ireland’s forests cover 11.6% of the country’s territory; since the 1980s they have been supported by more than 3 billion euros of state and EU investment, and a further 1.3 billion euros has been allocated to the 2023-2027 Forestry Programme. The National Forest Strategy foresees that by 2050 local timber will be the primary material in the construction of new homes.
The chair of the steering group, Professor J. Owen Lewis, who oversaw five thematic working groups that produced 46 recommendations in total, said the cooperation demonstrates a shared understanding: providing housing and meeting climate targets can be combined by using wood: “The task now is to ensure continuous leadership, political support and the sector’s commitment.”
For J. Lewis and the 64 organisations that took part in preparing the report, the goal is clear: to create a construction sector in which the share of timber-frame houses reaches the Scottish level (90% of volume housing) and in which the 7.8 million cubic metres of Irish roundwood forecast by 2035 are built into local homes rather than exported abroad.