Hotter summers in Ireland mean people risk “suffocating” in A rated homes, a housing expert has warned.
Heatwaves have become increasingly frequent in Ireland, something that has significant repercussions for infrastructure and nature.
On The Claire Byrne Show, Lorcan Sirr of TU Dublin explained that houses in Ireland have traditionally been designed to keep heat in - unlike Mediterranean homes, where they are designed to keep heat out.
“The issue, of course, then becomes that our climate is changing rapidly,” he said.
“As we've seen this summer, we can expect kind of hotter, more frequent, hotter summers.
“And our homes are kind of designed for the opposite of that.”
Dr Sirr continued that the “proliferation of apartments” - which retain heat to a high standard - will prove a particular problem.
He noted that many have window restrictors which are designed to prevent children falling out; however, in some apartments, even adults cannot remove them.
“So, the tenants are sitting there going, ‘I'm baking here in my small one bed apartment that I'm paying two and a half grand a month for and I can't open the window to ventilate the place as much as I could’,” Dr Sirr described.
“The other thing that the standards are, have changed to do is to remove the requirement for balconies.
“I have a colleague and he did a lot of research for the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, and they found that the quickest way to cool the Irish housing is this cross ventilation.
“But if you remove things like balconies and windows on both sides, it's very hard to do that.”
Dr Sirr predicted that in heatwaves it will be “suffocating” to live in an A rated home.
“Part of the reason that people have problems in A rated homes and is that is that they don't fully know how to use them properly,” he said.
“A lot of the standards that we have, like particularly when you get a passive house - [which] means it's generating as much kind of energy as it's using, for example.
“You can still have a lot of issues with overheating; so, it's a tricky one to manage.”
Main image: New terraced houses in Kinsale, County Cork. Picture by: Alamy.com.
