Could the factory floor solve Ireland’s housing gap?

Podcast Ep 374: Could modern methods of construction (MMC) help solve Ireland’s housing gap? Dr Alan Hore explains how MMC could boost productivity and housing delivery.

Hore says meeting housing demand depends on raising output per hour worked across a sector made up mostly of small firms.

The ESRI expects around 38,500 housing completions in Ireland this year, when the country needs closer to 50,000. With the economy at almost full employment, Dr Alan Hore says the difference will have to come from changing how construction work is done.

“We can’t manufacture manufacture more people,” said Hore, co-founder of CitA and leader of Skillnet MMC Accelerate, the national programme to upskill the industry in modern methods of construction (MMC) told the ThinkBusiness Podcast. “But what we need to do is get the same, if not better, productivity for each hour worked in building a project.”

Dr Alan Hore,is  the CitA co-founder who’s leading Skillnet MMC Accelerate, the national push to upskill construction in Modern Methods of Construction.

MMC in a nutshell: Instead of everything being built brick by brick in the rain, buildings are designed digitally, the components are manufactured with factory precision and quality checked before they leave the floor, then transported and assembled on site. Everything from timber frame and steel panels to full modular units, robotics, and 3D concrete printing. The result is homes delivered faster and more predictably, with consistent quality and far less waste.

Factory precision

• Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:

• Spotify

• SoundCloud

• Apple

Hore describes MMC as “applying the discipline and the precision of manufacturing to construction”. Buildings are designed digitally, he said, “and more of the work is completed in a controlled factory environment before the components are transported to site and assembled”. Factory work can run while the site is prepared, shortening the build.

He said prefabrication “isn’t new”, citing precast concrete and structural steel, but the definition now runs from 2D timber frame and light gauge steel frame to modular homes and 3D printing. He pointed to the MEP sector, which builds data centres and pharmaceutical plants. “These companies learned so much during Covid that they can actually build more in the factory in a controlled environment, and then ship using logistical supply chains, and ship more efficiently and plug and play on site,” he said.

👉 No tech background needed to bring your business into the AI age! Secure your Google AI Professional Certificate to complete the certification at no cost. Apply now and get started!

Hore said the factory model addresses the industry’s habit of improvising. “The challenge in construction, John, is always that it’s temporal in nature,” he said. “We’ve got a new site, a new client, a new design team.” His two sons, both quantity surveyors, are “constantly telling me about the improvisation that they have to make on site about things that don’t fit”.

The State as client

Policy has built on a 2024 Ernst & Young report on MMC skills, managed by the Expert Group on Future Skill Needs, which fed into an MMC action plan from the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science containing 58 actions. Hore cited the Government’s commitment to build more than a quarter of its social and affordable housing using MMC, and said the subject would come further to the fore during Ireland’s EU presidency.

There are more than 100 MMC companies in Ireland, 30 of them supplying the housing sector, according to Hore.

He wants the State to use its purchasing power as it did with building information modelling (BIM), the practice of building a project digitally before building it physically, which Ireland mandated for public contracts in 2022.

“It’s been a tremendous success,” he said. “In regard to MMC, it needs to be more of an ask for MMC by the State in delivering State projects.”

Skills and small firms

Skillnet MMC Accelerate runs a platform listing more than 130 job roles across design, manufacturing, quality assurance, logistics and site installation and more than 400 courses, from half-day sessions to postgraduate programmes.

The aim for 2027 is a competency framework for those roles. Hore, who spent more than 30 years in education, said: “We still don’t educate our surveyors and our architects and our engineers enough in that whole digital offsite space.” With MMC Ireland and the Technological University of the Shannon, CitA has developed a certificate in MMC adoption, a diploma in MMC optimisation and a Master of Science in MMC leadership.

“MMC cannot succeed without small firms,” Hore said. Between 91% and 99% of the industry is SMEs, depending on the source, and they employ the bulk of the more than 200,000 people in construction. Regional manufacturers, “whether they’re in Sligo or in Galway or Tipperary or wherever they’re based, they’re actually reaching out to SMEs,” bringing bricklayers, carpenters and electricians in to build in the factory. “That’s more attractive sometimes to them than getting in a van and traveling two hours a day to go to site.”

Some firms have already been pushed into the change. Hore described a visit in November 2024 to a fully automated steel reinforcement factory in Portlaoise that assembles reinforcement in the factory and sends it by truck to sites or by boat to the UK. It took that route, he said, “because they can’t get steel fixers, so they had to go this way.”

His advice to small businesses was “not to wait for MMC to appear in your next tender inquiry, but to start preparing now.”

👉 No tech background needed to bring your business into the AI age! Secure your Google AI Professional Certificate to complete the certification at no cost. Apply now and get started!

• Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day – funding investments, working capital and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, click here

• For support in challenging times, click here

• Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:

• Spotify

• SoundCloud

• Apple