PJ Rudden is Chair of Construction Innovation and Digital Adoption with the Department of Public Expenditure NDP Delivery and Reform. He considers how embracing modern policies and techniques can transform the industry in Ireland as it competes on a national and global scale
In September 2020, The CSG Subgroup for Innovation and Digital Adoption was set up as a first serious attempt to modernise the Irish construction industry.
A few months beforehand in June 2020, the KPMG report on productivity in the Irish construction sector was received by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.
This report made for very stark reading while it came as no great surprise to many of us. We quickly identified the key issues and concentrated on the elements of change which would have the best and more immediate impact.
These were the areas where we could impact mostly on productivity and sustainability.
The productivity of our construction workforce had been assessed by KPMG as nearly half that of the best performing Benelux and Nordic countries.
As we drilled into the data, it emerged that the relatively high productivity in these Northern European countries, was due mostly to their widespread use of digital systems or Building Information Modelling (BIM) on their major projects.
The Construction Sector Group (CSG) was set up by government in early 2018 consisting of 50:50 government departments and the construction industry.
This coincided with the Government initiating Project Ireland 2040 at the same time to ensure that the essential housing and infrastructure would be built by 2040 to cater for another one million people living on our island.
Since then, the CSG has become a powerful mechanism to ensure that government and industry have remained in step with each other as the industry has recovered from the deepest of recessions brought about from the 2008 – 2013 banking collapse and subsequent bailout.
Not only was the Construction Sector Group challenged in this work but it allowed us the invaluable opportunity to adopt the learnings and most modern policies and techniques from across Europe and further afield to hopefully realise a brand new industry to compete both nationally and internationally.
From the KPMG report, we adopted the seven most urgent tasks to modernise our industry which has stepped up in terms of digital adoption (BIM) for design and Modern Methods of Construction for construction of the National Development Plan 2021 – 2030.
Not only has this approach been favoured by industry to increase productivity but also in sustainability terms to meet the exacting new climate and carbon emission targets set out most recently in Climate Action Plan 2023.
Now as 2025 approaches, we are increasingly also adopting the concept of the circular economy in construction where handling waste is no longer a cost on projects but an opportunity to conserve and recycle recoverable resources whenever we can.
The CSG Subgroup has now been streamlined to match the ambition of the 2020 KPMG report on productivity in the Irish construction sector.
Since our formation in 2020, the Subgroup has availed of the expert knowledge and skills of some hundreds of our industry colleagues under seven priority actions/leaders as follows:
1. Undertake construction research with industry working collaboratively with government to solve ‘real life/ on-site’ problems and challenges (integrated into Action 4 below).
2. Import sustainability into all of our projects to include circular economy approaches and thus to ‘design out waste’ in projects led by the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland.
3. Set up systems for off-site construction to build momentum on Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) to replace the once widespread use of ‘bricks and mortar’ – roadmap by Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment with National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI) to ensure certification of products.
4. Enterprise Ireland to set up a Construction Technology Centre in 2022 to become a National Construction Technology Centre now rebranded ‘Construct Innovate’ hosted in one of our universities to become a ‘dedicated research engine’, now based in the University of Galway together with UCD, UCC, Irish Green Building Council and TU Dublin.
5. Establish a construction led Skillnet to identify the future skills required for the building of the National Development Plan (CIF together with Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science).
6. Digitise the current planning permission applications system from the current paper-based system (Local Government Management Agency and local authorities, now almost fully implemented).
7. Establish and fund a Build Digital Project across Ireland for BIM and digital adoption, now led with TU Dublin and Grangegorman Development Authority (GDA) together with MTU, ATU, UCD and Irish Green Building Council.
In addition to the CSG Subgroup’s work, a further significant government initiative took place in a refresh of the Project Ireland 2040 Delivery Board, which took place in early 2024.
This is the board which meets regularly to ensure effective leadership of the implementation of both the National Planning Framework and the National Development Plan.
In January 2024, the membership of this board was changed to include five independent external members and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform became the chair of the new board.
He then became the Minister for Public Expenditure NDP Delivery and Reform. With government approval, the Minister’s title now includes ‘NDP Delivery’ to emphasise the importance of infrastructure such as water, power and transport in addition to housing.
I was also appointed to be one of the five new external members, so the new board reporting directly to the Minister as chair has also now taken responsibility for the seven priority actions of the CSG Subgroup.
This change of governance greatly strengthened the ‘innovation and digital adoption’ remit of the CSG Subgroup, and it remains so to this day.
To conclude, construction in Ireland is currently being transformed to meet the challenges posed by the need to deliver the National Development Plan with greatly increased productivity and sustainability, also to enable meeting the ambitious challenges of the Climate Action Plan.
This innovation can only be achieved through real day to day collaboration between government and industry as has happened with the setting up and ongoing involvement of the Construction Sector Group since 2018 and its Innovation Subgroup since 2020.
PJ Rudden is Chair of CSG Subgroup on Innovation and Digital Adoption Member of the Project Ireland 2040 Delivery Board. He is a former President of Engineers Ireland, earning awards for project planning, communications, construction and innovation across a varied career in energy, circular economy, transport and water. He has also worked as Director of the EU Secretariat for the European Green Capital for sustainable cities. He was a speaker at this year’s CIF Digicon, discussing whether the industry has been sufficiently mobilised to become digitally mature.
