Permanent, not prefab: what €1.1bn of modular school spending should buy
In June, figures released to the Oireachtas showed that Ireland has spent around €1.3bn since 2020 on rented and modular school accommodation. Of that, some €222m went on rentals, while €1.14bn funded the Department of Education's modular accommodation programme between 2021 and 2025 — 595 completed projects, with a further 198 at an advanced stage of delivery. The coverage framed the total as spending on "temporary fixes". The Department pushed back, describing its modular units as permanent accommodation, delivered through modern methods of construction.
Both sides have a point, and the disagreement is worth taking seriously — because the word "prefab" is carrying two very different meanings, and the difference matters to anyone who commissions a school building.
Two buildings, one word
The prefab of Irish school memory was a rented box: steel or timber panels on temporary supports, minimal insulation, a design life measured in years and an occupancy that somehow stretched to decades. The €222m rental figure is the direct descendant of that model, and the criticism of it is fair. Renting temporary accommodation for permanent needs is poor value, and the Department's commitment to a strategic review of its rental arrangements by the end of 2026 is welcome.
A permanent modular building is a different proposition. It is a capital asset, not a rental. It is designed to the same Department of Education specifications, building regulations and design life as a site-built school. The distinction is not how the building arrives — on a lorry or brick by brick — but what it is required to do once it is there, and for how long. At an average of €367,000 per primary school unit before VAT, the State is buying buildings, not hiring them. The question specifiers should ask is what standard those buildings are held to.
What "permanent" should mean in practice
Permanence is measurable. When a modular school is procured as a permanent building, the specification can — and should — demand the same evidence a good site-built school would provide. Four tests do most of the work.
First, regulatory performance: full compliance with Part L and the NZEB standard, evidenced by an A-rated BER, not a derogation. Second, tested airtightness rather than assumed airtightness. Factory conditions make this achievable to a degree that is difficult on an open site: Lidan's envelopes are built to meet or better the passive house benchmark of 0.6 air changes per hour, and Gaelscoil na Laochra in Birr — a 1,000 m² permanent modular school opened in February 2024 — tested at 0.64, a result in passive-house territory for a volumetric public building.
Third, declared embodied carbon. The RIAI's current benchmark for non-domestic buildings is 1,000 kg CO₂e/m², with a 2030 Climate Challenge target of 540. Gaelscoil na Laochra came in at 488 kg CO₂e/m² — below the 2030 target, six years early — and St Patrick's College in Cork at 249, results that follow from timber structure and natural insulation rather than from offsetting. Fourth, running costs: Birr heats for roughly €91 a month. A building that is cheap to acquire but expensive to run is not the bargain it appears in year one.
None of these criteria is exotic. All of them can be written into a tender today, and each one filters for the permanent end of the modular market.
Speed is the bonus, not the point
The case for modular schools is usually made on programme, and the programme case is real. St Flannan's College in Ennis — a 2,500 m² special educational needs building, 87% prefabricated — went on site in September 2024 and welcomed students in September 2025, a timeline The Irish Post described as a template for rapid builds. When a school place is needed for this September, not in three years, that speed is the difference between provision and its absence.
But speed alone was also the prefab-era promise, and it produced buildings nobody defends today. What has changed is that factory construction can now deliver speed and permanence at once — and national policy is moving to support it. The Timber in Construction Steering Group's final report, published in June, sets out seven recommendations across regulation, procurement and carbon policy to increase the use of timber in Irish construction — a clear signal to public bodies that specifying timber structure is a direction of travel, not a niche preference.
The €1.3bn figure will be debated for some time, and the Department's end-of-2026 review will be the moment the two meanings of "prefab" are finally separated on paper. For specifiers, the useful conclusion is available now: permanence is not about tenure or construction method, but about performance that can be tested, declared and compared. Buildings that meet that bar already exist — and they were made in a factory.